>.*>*. .>..> 1. > 




il 




Class. 

Book 

Copyright^ 






COF/RIGHT DEPOSIT. 



STUDIES IN THE 
ATONEMENT 




CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 



c.\°\ \A : ^ 






COPYHIQHT, 1914, BT 

Jennings and Graham 






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FEB 24 I9i4 

©CI.A369103 



Contents 

CHAPTEB PAGE 

I. Necessity for a Restatement of 

Theology, - - - - 11 

II. The Modern Point of View, - 25 

III. The Christ of the New Testa- 

ment, - - - - - 39 

IV. What Is the Christian Doctrine 

of Atonement? 49 

V. The Cosmic Cross, - - -55 

VI. The Cosmic Root of Holiness, 61 

VII. The Cosmic Root of Love, - 93 

VIII. The Principle of the Cross, - 115 

IX. Forgiveness Through the Cross, 123 

X. The Power of the Cross, - - 147 

XI. The Principle of the Lord's 

Supper, 157 

XII. Modern Views and Ancient Lan- 
guage, ----- 165 

XIII. Recapitulation, - - 177 



Introduction 

IT was with a feeling akin to presumption 
that these studies on the atonement were 
undertaken. When so many of the wise 
and good of ages past have presented their solu- 
tions, it seems presumptuous to hope that any 
further light can be thrown on so profound a 
subject. 

This little book grows out of an intense per- 
sonal experience — a fact which extenuates the 
presumption. Nineteen years ago, in college 
days, the author's mind was torn with doubt 
and perplexity over the doctrine of the atone- 
ment. The books I read, most of them standard 
works accepted by the Churches, and the ser- 
mons I heard, both liberal and orthodox, ap- 
pealed neither to my reason nor my conscience. 
In fact, they left me in more hopeless confusion. 
They only thickened the mists. I well remember 
the mental despair into which I sank. For some 
years I avoided all reading on the subject; for 
5 



INTRODUCTION 

there had come over me a deep dissatisfaction 
with the generally accepted views. In the course 
of years, with little apparent effort on my part, 
the fog seemed slowly to clear away, and almost 
before I knew it I found myself in possession 
of what was to me an intellectually rational and 
morally satisfactory theory of the subject. 
Further reading in many lines, deeper knowl- 
edge of the New Testament Christ, and more 
intimate acquaintance with human life, have 
only confirmed this view. The result of these 
experiences is embodied in this humble treatise. 
Complete originality is not claimed for ,all the 
views here expressed: we live too late to be 
original; but in a veiy true sense, that is orig- 
inal which is independently evolved out of one's 
own life, even though others may have had the 
same experiences and expressed the same ideas. 
In this sense, all religious experience is original 
with every soul. 

The theory here outlined appears to me ra- 
tional and morally defensible. If it shall appear 
so to unprejudiced readers, and shall aid some 
confused and doubting mind to clearer under- 
6 



INTRODUCTION 

standing of Calvary, the reward will be worth 
the lonely years of intellectual confusion through 
which the author passed on his way to peace 
and joy. 

Willard Nathan Tobie. 
Lincoln, Illinois, 1913. 



CHAPTER I 



The Necessity for a Restatement 
of Theology 



Chapter I 

THE NECESSITY FOR A RESTATEMENT 
OF THEOLOGY 

TRUTH is essentially the same in all ages. 
"The "Word of the Lord endureth for- 
ever. ' ' It is also a fact that human view- 
points change, and therefore expression of truth 
will inevitably change. Every age has its char- 
acteristic point of view, its dominant mode of 
thinking. The truth of the ages is expressed 
in the language of the age, and is differently 
approached in various periods of human history. 
There is an old story of four blind men who 
were allowed to touch an elephant as they went 
past. One, who happened to grasp his tail, said 
the elephant was like a rope. Another, who 
had touched his leg, said the elephant was like 
the trunk of a tree. The third, having felt the 
animal's side, said, "That is all rubbish: an 
elephant is like a wall. ' ' The fourth blind man, 
who had felt only the great ear of the elephant, 
11 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

affirmed that he was like none of those things 
aforesaid, but was like a leather bag. So our 
view of truth depends largely on the angle from 
which we approach it, and our description of 
it will be in the language of our experience. 
In the age when men thought the earth was 
the stationary center about which revolved plan- 
ets, sun, and stars, all thinking was colored more 
or less by that hypothesis. Copernicus, Galileo, 
Kepler, and Newton changed the intellectual 
viewpoint, not only for astronomy, but for all 
categories of thought. 

Theology, no less than physical science or 
philosophy, is modified by the dominant thought- 
form of the age. Theology is either rabbinical, 
ritualistic, scholastic, mathematical, legal, polit- 
ical, evolutionary, or humanitarian, according to 
the theologian's characteristic thought-form; and 
the theologian's thought-form is affected by the 
dominant spirit of his time no less than the 
color of the chameleon is affected by environ- 
ment, or the thermometer by temperature. 

The Bible abounds in evidence of this state- 
ment. Running throughout the Old Testament 
12 



RESTATEMENT OF THEOLOGY 

are at least two widely different classes of writ- 
ings, the priestly and the prophetic, the differ- 
ence being due to differing viewpoints of iden- 
tical truth. Priestly writers thought in terms 
of rite and symbol. To them the ceremonies 
of the cult were the language in which Jehovah 
expressed His thought. The priestly religion 
was formal, sacrificial, ritualistic. Opposed to 
this was the prophetic attitude. This was less 
formal. Ritual was minimized. Externalism 
was often ridiculed and condemned. To the 
prophetic soul God spoke not so much in the 
design of tabernacle or temple, in bloody sacri- 
fices, or in any ceremonial observances, as in 
creation, in historic providence, in the still small 
voice of the Spirit. The heavens and the earth 
were full of the glory of Jehovah, and their 
"words" spoke to the end of the world, telling 
God's power and wisdom. The rise and fall 
of nations were the doings of a majestic, moral 
God. By Him kings reigned and princes de- 
creed justice. The prophet needed no Shekinah 
to assure him of Jehovah 's presence. Sun, moon, 
and stars, the beauty of the earth, and its provi- 
13 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

dential adjustments, were the testimony — the 
very Ark and Shekinah of omnipresent Deity. 
The prophet's own soul, hot with moral en- 
thusiasm, was the sacrificial altar burning with 
sacred fire. Micah sets these two attitudes in 
contrast in the sixth chapter: 

"Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, 
and bow myself before the high God? shall I 
come before Him Avith burnt offerings, with 
calves a year old ? Will Jehovah be pleased with 
thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of 
rivers of oil ? Shall I give my first-born for my 
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin 
of my soul ? He hath showed thee, O man, what 
is good ; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, 
but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to 
walk humbly with thy God?" 

These two views of religion still persist, even 
in Christianity. The Roman Church thinks in 
terms of symbol and ceremony. Her views of 
Deity, duty, destiny are more or less formal, 
mechanical, ritualistic. The Protestant Church 
represents more or less the prophetic aspect of 
religion. The Romjan Church exalts the altar; 
14 



RESTATEMENT OF THEOLOGY 

the Protestant, the pulpit. The typical Papist 
thinks in terms of cult and institution; the 
normal Protestant of the evangelical type in 
terms of the individual soul and its relation to 
the cosmos. Although both hold the same his- 
torical facts as the foundation of the Christian 
religion, their conception and interpretation of 
those facts vary because of fundamentally dif- 
ferent mental attitudes. 

This has been the history of religious and 
philosophical thought as long as men have in- 
dulged in speculation. There was a time when 
Jewish theology ran in the narrow channel of 
rabbinical hair-splitting. It was so in the time 
of Christ. His offense was that He filled the 
channel so full of the water of life that it 
broke over the banks and levees of rabbinical 
narrowness and irrigated the desert of the 
starved spirit. The contemporary thought-form 
and religious cult could not contain the abun- 
dant life and the truth He had to give. He had 
to put new wine into new wine-skins: the old 
would have burst. In fact, they did burst. The 
tremendous vitality of His revelation shattered 
15 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

the old vessel of Judaism and overflowed the 
world. 

Even the followers of Christ, however, could 
not at once break out of the channel of con- 
temporary thought. The Apostolic Church was 
rent with discussion between these two types 
of mind. The Judaizing teachers insisted on 
the old rites. They dogged Paul's steps, drag- 
ging their old wine-skins after them, to bottle 
up, if possible, the new spiritual life in Christ. 
They could not think in terms of catholic Chris- 
tianity. The originality of Paul's genius was 
his ability to break loose from the fetters of 
his rabbinical and ritualistic training and habit 
of thought and to become acclimated in the new 
intellectual atmosphere created by the Spirit of 
Christ. In the quickness and thoroughness of 
that mental adaptability he stood singularly 
alone among the apostles. He was the prophet 
and the Protestant of his day. 

Yet, like the Protestants of Luther's day, 

even Paul could aot wholly extricate his mind 

from its habits under the old regime. Traces of 

literalism in exegesis once in a while occur in 

16 



RESTATEMENT OF THEOLOGY 

the swift movement of his argument, as in 
Galatians 3:16, where he tries to support his 
position by making a distinction between "seed" 
and ' ' seeds. ' ' In the fourth chapter of the same 
letter he resorts to the old allegorical method 
of interpretation. He was perhaps justified in 
this, because it was a means of approach to a 
rabbinical mind — a rabbinical answer to a rab- 
binical argument. 

What I am trying to emphasize is that the 
theology of any given period (the same being 
true of all speculative thought) is colored by 
the dominant intellectual conception of things 
prevailing at the time. The Bible is no excep- 
tion. Even the New Testament is a Jewish book, 
although it contains a catholic religion. It is 
more or less Jewish in phraseology and mental 
attitude. The Book of Hebrews, for instance, is 
conceived and born with all the psychological 
features of a Hebrew mind reared in the at- 
mosphere of ritualism, although its very pur- 
pose is to show the inefficacy of that antiquated 
ritualism. Its whole argument is cast in the 
mold of sacerdotalism and the institution of 
sacrifice. 17 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

The Biblical doctrine of the atonement is no 
exception to what has been said. More, perhaps, 
than any other Christian doctrine it has been 
colored by Jewish ceremonialism, because, by its 
very nature, it can be so easily expressed, espe- 
cially to Jews, to whom most of the Epistles were 
addressed, in sacrificial and sacerdotal language. 
Those who insist on the letter of the New Testa- 
ment in formulating theories of atonement 
will do well to remember these things, and also 
to remember that as general conceptions of so- 
ciety and the universe change, the phraseology 
and intellectual setting of theology will change. 

After the apostolic days theology was even 
more modified by the prevailing human interest 
of the times. Augustine, the giant among the- 
ologians, measured by his influence, lived in the 
years when the stupendous Roman Empire was 
tottering to its fall. For centuries her em- 
perors had dominated the world. Her imperial 
sovereignty had filled the thought of civilized 
men like a great mountain rising abruptly out 
of a vast plain. Sovereignty of Cassar had be- 
come the habitual thought of civilized man. But 
18 



RESTATEMENT OF THEOLOGY 

in Augustine 's day that sovereignty was rocking 
on its pedestal. Jerome, the great scholar, trou- 
bled at the prospect of the empire's dissolution, 
exclaimed, "Who is safe when Rome falls?" 
Augustine, undismayed, proclaimed in his ' ' City 
of God" that God is absolute Sovereign and 
that the Church is the successor of the dying 
empire. His theology was built upon the anal- 
ogy of the empire. Augustine's God was abso- 
lute monarch, arbitrarily electing the saved and 
the damned, a kind of exalted Roman emperor, 
having arbirtrary power of life and death. This 
view prevailed until the era of popular govern- 
ment began. "With constitutional republicanism 
came a strong popular drift away from stern 
Augustinianism and its later form, Calvinism. 
When men would no longer tolerate irrational 
absolutism in their politics, they no longer found 
it easy to tolerate it in their theology. Augus- 
tine's doctrine of the atonement was derived 
from the common experience of conflicting em- 
pires. In his thought it was God's Kingdom 
against the devil's, and Christ was a ransom 
paid to the devil. His theory was born of the 
19 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

warlike spirit of the age, and has been called the 
"Military'' theory. 

Later, in the eleventh century, Anselm pro- 
posed what has been called the "Commercial" 
theory, or, sometimes, the " Criminal' ' theory. 
He taught that the suffering of Christ paid a 
debt, not to the devil, but to God for sin, which 
was an infinite offense against Infinite Dignity 
and Majesty. Here again we see the influence 
of exaggerated notions of the sacredness of kings 
and of popes. He lived in a time when punish- 
ment was common for offenses against the "law 
of majesty." In his theory it is not difficult to 
see the influence of feudalism. 

Then came Grotius, a jurist, with his "Gov- 
ernmental" theory. This theory holds that 
Christ's death was not the payment of a debt, 
not the suffering of adequate penalty for sin 
due to man but assumed by Christ, but a mere 
exhibition of God's regard for His own law. 
The law is sacred, and violations of it must 
not be forgiven in such a way as to seem to 
subtract from its sacredness and supremacy. 
Christ died, therefore, to show that the law 
20 



RESTATEMENT OF THEOLOGY 

must have due respect, lest sinners be encour- 
aged to neglect or depreciate that law. 

In all this we see the mind of the lawyer — 
and we are not ignorant of his devices. This 
theory has the fault not only of having no 
Scriptural support, but of exalting abstract law 
above the personality of the Lawgiver. It rep- 
resents Judge, Advocate, and the prisoner ar- 
raigned as all subordinate to an abstraction 
called the Law — usually a good doctrine as ap- 
plied to human administration of justice, but 
inadequate when applied to God as the Heavenly 
Father, as it would be absurd when applied in 
a human home. Its fallacy is that of abstracting 
an attribute of God and exalting it above God 
Himself, as if the light of the sun were so much 
more important than the sun itself. It also 
seems to make such a precise distinction between 
the Father and the Son as to remove the latter 
out of the realm of the Godhead. Yet the pur- 
pose of this paragraph is not to criticise the 
theory of Grotius so much as to illustrate how 
theories of Christ's atoning and redeeming work 
are affected by habitual mental attitudes — how 
21 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

the same fact underlying the theories may be 
variously distorted by the mental spectacles 
worn by the observers, and how, if the truth 
is to be discovered, we must make allowance for 
what astronomers call the "personal equation." 



22 



CHAPTER II 

The Modern Point of View 



Chapter II 

THE MODERN POINT OF VIEW 

A DJUSTMENT of unchanging truths to new 
L\ thought-habits must forever be going on. 
If theology is not to become a fossil dis- 
played in museums of intellectual history, it 
must be clothed in terms of our own age. If 
it is to command our interest, it must be fitted 
like a noble spire into the architectural design 
of the modern temple of thought, forming an 
integral part of the unified structure, and not 
built apart, like the ancient campanile, whence 
self-appointed watchmen of orthodoxy scan the 
horizon for the enemies of Zion. The seamless 
garment of Christ is a beautiful symbol of the 
truth that there are no breaks between true 
science, philosophy, and religion, which together 
form the seamless robe of Deity. 

Our own age has its characteristic thought- 
form, its own dominating hypothesis, that in- 
evitably shapes our thinking on nearly all sub- 
25 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

jects. If theology, and, specifically, the doctrine 
of the atonement, is to get access to the modern 
mind so as to have useful relation to the life 
of the times, it must show itself capable of 
being fitted into the general scheme of the gen- 
eration's thought. Then only will theology be 
vital and influential. Truth is practically non- 
existent to the mind until it gets into the mind. 
The fact is objectively existent, but it is "like 
a star, and dwells apart," having no utility in 
practical life. And to get access to the mind, 
truth must find the point of contact, and that 
point of contact is the mode in which people 
of a given period think of the universe and of 
society. 

What, then, is the habit of the modern mind 1 
First of all, the all-dominating hypothesis is 
Evolution. The modern mind, as a whole, is 
as thoroughly convinced that the universe, or- 
ganic and inorganic, is a growth, a development, 
as it is convinced of the universal validity of 
the law of gravitation. Just how the universe 
has evolved into its present form none are so 
presumptuous as to say in a tone of final au- 
26 



THE MODERN POINT OF VIEW 

thority; but that it has evolved is almost unani- 
mously agreed among those who have, by their 
investigation, a right to an opinion. Not all 
the factors of the evolutionary process are de- 
termined, but the process is. Whether the in- 
dwelling cause of evolution be personal or im- 
personal may be a casus belli, but not the fact 
of evolution. Whether progression or regression 
has been by minute variations alone, or occa- 
sionally by sudden leaps, or "sports," may be 
open to discussion, but not the hypothesis that 
higher forms have evolved out of lower forms, 
or, sometimes, the reverse. Darwin did not 
simply invent a new theory ; he flooded the mind 
of man with a cosmic vision. 

That vision will not soon be dispelled. It 
may possibly be a false light, a mirage; but 
this age is convinced that it is true; and noth- 
ing short of an intellectual cataclysm can dis- 
lodge the conviction. Astronomers unanimously 
accept the dictum that the solar systems have 
grown out of formless antecedents. Spiral neb- 
ulae were the morning stars that sang together 
the prophetic oratorio of coming worlds. The 
27 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

geologist takes up the tale where the astronomer 
leaves off, telling in scientific demonstration of 
an earth once "waste and void," corroborating 
the brief statement of the wonderful old Bible. 
He tells us that Mother Earth herself has grown 
from childhood, through a turbulent and volcanic 
youth, to her present settled and prolific ma- 
ternity. Le Conte, in his "Elements of Geol- 
ogy/' says: "Evolution is the central idea of 
geology. It is this idea alone which makes 
geology a distinct science. This is the cohesive 
principle which unites and gives significance to 
all the scattered facts of geology — which cements 
what would otherwise be a mere incoherent pile 
of rubbish into a solid and symmetrical edifice. ' ' 
The biologist then takes up the wondrous tale, 
and avers that living organisms' are obedient 
to the same law; that the ancestry even of the 
aristocratic mammalia, including royal Man, had 
a plebeian origin; that the richness and abun- 
dance of modern life is the outcome of the stern 
discipline of the compulsory education law im- 
posed by environment; that the "one far-off, di- 
vine event" of astronomy, geology, and biology 
28 



THE MODERN POINT OF VIEW 

was to make a conqueror, a victorious person- 
ality— MAN. 

Thus also speaks the Bible: Man, the apex 
of creation — the final fruit of "the earnest ex- 
pectation of the creation waiting for the re- 
vealing of the sons of God ... in hope 
that the creation itself also shall be delivered 
from the bondage of corruption into the liberty 
of the glory of the children of God. For we 
know that the whole creation groaneth and tra- 
vaileth in pain together until now. And not 
only so, but ourselves also, who have the first- 
fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan 
within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to- 
wit, the redemption of our body." (Rom. 8: 
19-23.) Is there a finer statement of the fact 
of evolution, though perhaps not intended as 
such in the modern sense, than these words of 
Paul ? Man, apex of creation, made in the image 
of God! That is the statement of science, phi- 
losophy, and religion. From God to God is the 
story evolution has to tell. "From whom, 
through whom, and unto whom are all things." 
Biology and the Bible both declare Man to be 
29 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

the culmination of creation; and our religion 
makes Christ the culminating point of humanity, 
the single point where the Creator's original 
purpose and His age-long process return to Him- 
self in the God-Man — Jesus Christ, Son of God, 
Son of man, completing the circle from God to 
God. Christ is the first Cause and final Cause — 
"Alpha and Omega." 

Biology, however, stops at the point where 
the animal became human. It stops with the 
evolution of the physical equipment of the hu- 
man animal. There History lights her torch 
and adds to the illumination. She tells us that 
civilization is a growth from coarse, brutal ante- 
cedents. Out of savagery, by slow accumula- 
tions, has come Christian society — the very King- 
dom of God. Anthropology, philology, and the 
social sciences have no scientific standing apart 
from some theory of evolution. Even the Bible 
student, whether conservative or liberal, to-day 
accepts the doctrine of "Progressive Revela- 
tion" as the point of departure in Biblical in- 
terpretation and criticism. No history of any 
30 



THE MODERN POINT OF VIEW 

department of human life which ignores the fact 
of evolution could to-day be written. 

Not only is all thought of our century cast 
in the evolutionary mold, but the modern mind 
believes tenaciously in the unity of the universe. 
It has taken man a long time to gather up the 
dissevered fragments of his thought and com- 
bine them into one related whole. He has not 
yet finished the task; but he is convinced that 
the unity exists, if only he could see a little 
more clearly. 

Newton made an enormous stride toward uni- 
fying human thought in his discovery of the 
law of gravitation. At once flashed upon the 
human mind a vision of the hitherto fragmen- 
tary heavens bound into unity by obedience to 
one unvarying law, held in beautiful mathemat- 
ical harmony by one omnipresent power. Later 
came the demonstration of the conservation of 
force and the correlation of forces — another gi- 
gantic step toward the essential unity of things. 
Then came Darwin, unifying the confusing di- 
versity of the animate world by relating the 
31 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

species. Herbert Spencer and others then ap- 
plied the development theory to philosophy. 
And now the chemists and physicists seem to 
be going over to the theory of the ultimate 
identity of the chemical elements. Mediaeval 
alchemy contained a dim dream of the truth; 
for, while base metals have not been turned into 
gold, uranium produces radium, radium changes 
into helium, and copper into lithium; and sci- 
entists are now talking about "electrons" and 
' ' corpuscles ' ' as the ultimate units of all matter. 
To-day, therefore, the unity of the universe is 
a doctrine worthy of all acceptation, and "one 
increasing purpose" is read between the lines 
in the interpretation of all phenomena. 

The story is told that Apollo once made a 
lovely statue and then withdrew from earth. In 
looting the city where this ideal statue was, 
some soldiers broke the statue, a soldier from 
Sparta taking away a hand, a man of Thebes a 
foot, an Ephesian taking a broken arm, while 
an Athenian took the mutilated torso. After 
the lapse of years the origin of the fragments 
was forgotten, but each city owning a piece 
32 



THE MODERN POINT OF VIEW 

recognized the perfection of its own fragment. 
Restorations were made by art critics in each 
of the cities on the basis of these pieces. After 
a while a kind of art fair was held in Athens, 
and these restored statues were brought to the 
exhibition, where lectures were given upon them, 
each lecturer contending for the superiority of 
his own restoration. Suddenly a stranger ap- 
peared, who suggested that perhaps if the frag- 
ments upon which these restorations had been 
made should be brought together, it would be 
found that they all belonged to the same original 
statue. They jeered the suggestion and turned 
in scorn away. A few, however, remained and 
challenged the stranger to take the fragments 
and prove his theory, wonder of wonders! 
As he fitted arm to shoulder and hand to wrist 
and foot to limb, the surprise of the artists knew 
no measure; and when at last the stranger 
crowned the torso by placing upon it the beauti- 
ful head, the artists fell upon their knees in 
ecstasy and adoration. The stranger vanished; 
but afterward they remembered that the face 
of the statue was the face of him who had re- 
stored it. 33 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

When the dissevered fragments of our knowl- 
edge are at last put together in the light of our 
faith in the unity of the universe, it will be 
found our faith was justified and that the uni- 
verse bears the image of Him who made it, 
"from whom, through whom, and unto whom 
are all things. ' ' 

The mental attitude of our time is, thirdly, 
increasingly humanitarian. Social problems 
largely occupy the thought of our century. 
"Within the century the growing humaneness has 
banished many a social abuse and accomplished 
many reforms. Slavery has mostly disappeared. 
Better conditions exist for the laboring classes, 
and are steadily improving. Agitations for pro- 
tection of childhood are continuous and vigor- 
ous. Because of the growing humaneness, the 
cry, "The saloon must go," is raised with de- 
termined insistence. Because of the increasing 
valuation of human life, war is slowly retreating 
into the distance. Judicial penalties are less 
brutal and vindictive than formerly. A new 
spirit has come upon us in the treatment of 
criminals. Punishment of the criminal for the 
34 



THE MODERN POINT OF VIEW 

purpose of his reform is an idea growing in 
prominence. All dependent classes are treated 
with humaneness far in advance of any former 
time. The brotherhood of man grows. The 
Christian doctrine of God's Fatherhood is more 
and more being turned to practical account in 
the practice of brotherliness. 

Evolution and the Christian religion come 
together, therefore, in the spirit of this age in 
its high valuation of humanity. Centuries be- 
fore evolution was seriously thought of, Christ 
taught the supreme value of a human soul. Then 
came corroboration and emphasis in the scientific 
vision that the groaning and travail of the world 
was largely for the purpose of giving birth to 
the human soul. Surely, then, what has taken 
age-long labor and suffering to produce must 
be of incalculable worth ; and as never before we 
see that the Christian religion, in its estimate 
of man, is based on cosmic principles. "We seem 
to see now that the Father-Creator has been sub- 
jecting His world to severe discipline that He 
might make us more than conquerors — strong 
personal spirits in His own image. And we seem 
35 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

to see also that from the beginning until now 
He has been in His world, guiding the process 
with intelligent purpose. 

Now, if the Christian doctrine of the atone- 
ment is to get access to the modern mind, it 
must be expressed in such a way as to fit into 
the thought-scheme above described. People 
must see, in harmony with their notion of the 
unity of the universe, that the atonement is not 
a disjointed and academic affair of cloistered 
doctors of divinity, but a cosmic fact. In har- 
mony with notions of evolution, it must be shown 
to modern folks that the cross of Christ is the 
completion of a cosmic law having its manifesta- 
tions not only in one event of history, but also 
in the ordinary human world and even in the 
sub-human world; that it is the culmination of 
something that has gone before. To satisfy the 
humanitarian spirit of the age, the doctrine of 
the atonement, as well as all theology, must be 
built on the doctrine of God as Father — such 
a Father as Jesus revealed. Can the Christian 
doctrine of atonement be so related without do- 
ing violence to the plain facts of the Christian 
Scriptures? That is the task before us. 



CHAPTER III 

The Christ of the New Testament 

"His name shall be called Wonderful." 
— Isa. 9 : 6. 



Chapter III 

THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 

A PART from all explanations stands the fact 
L\ of Jesus Christ. A unique and majestic 
figure is He who walks through the pages 
of the New Testament. It is not strange that 
all attempted explanations of Him and His work 
appear inadequate. Truly His name is called 
"Wonderful." The New Testament never fal- 
ters in its bold delineation of the Savior of the 
world. It has an almost incredible story to tell, 
but tells it with such evident sincerity, confi- 
dence, and simplicity as to compel belief. 

Jesus Christ, declared to be pre-existent, co- 
eternal with the Father-Creator, is alleged to 
have been conceived by the Divine Spirit and 
born of Mary, a Jewish virgin. He is declared 
by the disciple who knew Him best to have been 
the Divine Logos, the very Word of God. He 
was born in peculiarly humble surroundings, of 
a peasant virgin, in a stable of an Oriental khan 
39 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

at Bethlehem. Of His childhood little is known 
except the circumstances of His birth, the brief 
sojourn in Egypt in order to escape bloodthirsty- 
Herod, and His subsequent residence in Naz- 
areth with His mother and her husband, Joseph, 
a carpenter. One incident only is given of His 
youth: His visit to Jerusalem at the age of 
twelve with His parents, and His conversation 
with the scribes in the temple. The simple, un- 
affected accounts of His childhood and youth by 
the evangelists are remarkable for what they 
omit. If His later alleged miracles have no 
foundation in fact except the mythological tend- 
encies of the Gospel writers, as some critics 
aver, how shall we account for the total absti- 
nence, after the events connected with His birth, 
of any narrative of wonderful doings of this 
supernatural Boy? This absence of myth is 
strong evidence of the veracity of the writers. 
About the age of thirty He was baptized by 
John Baptist at the Jordan. Very soon after- 
ward He went into a few weeks' retirement in 
the lonely wilderness, where He suffered three 
kinds of temptation, but yielded to none. This 
40 



THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 

uninterrupted victory over strong appeals of evil 
was an outstanding feature of His life. He is 
portrayed as the Sinless Man, and all subse- 
quent generations have approved the portrait. 
He Himself challenged His enemies to convict 
Him of sin, and the only charges they made 
were to His advantage: "He eateth with pub- 
licans and sinners," and "He made Himself the 
Son of God." True or false, the portrait is a 
miracle. If it is true, it is a perpetual wonder 
eliciting the adoration of all people; if it be 
false, it is equally hard to explain where the 
four evangelists got their model. Certainly not 
out of their own imaginations. Possibly one 
lofty genius might have hit upon such a concep- 
tion — though that is not probable; but how 
could four contemporaries, writing apart, have 
hit upon so uniform and unique a picture? 
There is only one reasonable explanation: they 
knew the Original. 

This Man, after His retreat into the wilds, 

emerged to begin a remarkable career. He went 

from place to place, followed by a few disciples, 

teaching people of all classes concerning the 

41 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

moral and spiritual Kingdom. Matthew in brief 
epitome gives the story of His life : "And Jesus 
went about all the cities and villages, teaching 
in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel 
of the Kingdom, and healing all manner of sick- 
ness. But when He saw the multitudes, He was 
moved with compassion for them, because they 
were distressed and scattered, as sheep not hav- 
ing a shepherd." (Matt. 9:35, 36.) Helpful- 
ness, kindness, compassion, humble condescen- 
sion to the lowly attended Him as ministering 
angels wherever He went. He reserved His 
severity for the proud, selfish, self-satisfied aris- 
tocrat ; His gentleness for the repentant outcast, 
the burdened poor, the sick and suffering, the 
honest seeker for truth. He wept at human 
graves, and on three recorded occasions raised 
the dead. Terrible as Jove's thunder when 
aroused to moral indignation, He could soothe 
aching hearts with words more tender than the 
cooing of the mourning dove, sweeter than the 
plaintive, far-away tones of a great organ. He 
was the humblest, most condescending of men, 
making no artificial distinctions between class 
42 



THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 

and class, or man and man, yet He miade the 
astounding claim that He was sent from heaven 
as the special Spokesman of the Father, the very- 
Son of God, one with the Father- Creator. "I 
am the "Way, the Truth, and the Life: no one 
cometh unto the Father but by Me," — "He that 
hath seen Me hath seen the Father," is the. un- 
faltering declaration of His lips and His life. 
Never was such humility of life so harmoniously 
united with such lofty personal claims, and in 
a manner that never jars our sense of propor- 
tion. His affirmations about His personality, 
together with His popularity with the common 
people, however, brought Him into conflict with 
the ruling hierarchy, and He was, through envy, 
hate, bribery, perjury, and the most nefarious 
mistrials, brought to crucifixion. 

On the night before His crucifixion He in- 
stituted a unique ceremony. While eating the 
last meal with His disciples, He took bread and 
broke it and gave to each of them, saying, 
"Take, eat; this is My body, which was broken 
for you." Likewise, after supper He took a 
cup of wine and bade them all drink of it, say- 
43 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

ing, "This is My blood of the covenant, which 
is poured out for many unto remission of sins. ' ' 
That night, in agony of prayer and bloody sweat, 
"the Savior wrestles alone with fears" — "for 
others' guilt the Man of Sorrows weeps in 
blood." That night He was betrayed by a dis- 
ciple, was arrested by a mongrel mob, and, after 
a judicial outrage in the Jewish court, He died 
on the cross between two criminals, His last 
words being, "It is finished." He was buried, 
and on the third day rose from the dead, ap- 
peared several times to His followers, and about 
forty days later visibly ascended from the earth. 
A few days after this event a strange illumina- 
tion and unction came upon the waiting Chris- 
tians, and from that day to this the apostles 
and their successors have preached through this 
Man's death the forgiveness of human sin, sal- 
vation from moral evil, and final redemption 
from all human ills. From the day of Pente- 
cost to the "Amen" of the Book of Revelation, 
on every page of the New Testament is written 
the pathetic and consoling melody, ' ' Christ died 
for our sins." 

44 



THE CHRIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 

Wonderful old story ! How it has stirred mil- 
lions of human hearts and softened them into 
tenderness and goodness! What does it all 
mean? 



CHAPTER IV 



What is the Christian Doctrine of 
Atonement? 



Chapter IV 

WHAT IS THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF 
ATONEMENT ? 

" r |1 HIS is My blood of the covenant, which 
is shed for many unto remission of 
sins."— Matt. 26:28. 

"Christ died for our sins." — 1 Cor. 15:3. 

"Who His own self bare our sins in His body 
upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, 
might live unto righteousness; by whose stripes 
ye were healed. ' ' — 1 Peter 2 : 24. 

"Now once at the end of the ages hath He 
been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice 
of Himself."— Heb. 9:26. 

"In whom we have redemption through His 
blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses." — Eph. 
1:7. 

"While we were enemies, we were reconciled 
to God by the death of His Son."— Rom. 5: 10. 

"There is one God, one Mediator also be- 
tween God and men, Himself man, Christ Jesus, 

4 49 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

who gave Himself a ransom for all." — 1 Tim. 
2:5,6. 

"Who gave Himself for us, that He might 
redeem us from all iniquity." — Titus 2:14. 

"God so loved the world that He gave His 
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on 
Him should not perish, but have eternal life. ' ' — 
John 3 : 16. 

"Herein is love, not that we loved God, but 
that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the 
propitiation for our sins. ' ' — 1 John 4 : 10. 

"God was in Christ reconciling the world 
unto Himself, not reckoning unto them their 
trespasses. ' ' — 2 Cor. 5 : 19. 

"If we walk in the light, as He is in the 
light, we have fellowship one with another, and 
the blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from 
all sin. ' ' — 1 John 1 : 7. 

' ' All have sinned, and fall short of the glory 
of God: being justified freely by His grace 
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus : 
whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through 
faith in His blood."— Rom. 3:23-25. 

1 ' It was the good pleasure of the Father that 
50 



DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT 

in Him. should all the fullness dwell; and 
through Him to reconcile all things unto Him- 
self, having made peace through the blood of 
His cross; through Him, I say, whether things 
upon the earth, or things in the heavens. And 
you, being in time past alienated and enemies 
in your mind in your evil works, yet now hath 
He reconciled in the body of His flesh through 
death, to present you holy and without blemish 
and unreprovable before Him. ' ' — Colos. 1 : 19-22. 
These and many other similar passages em- 
body the Scripture doctrine of the atonement. 
"Christ died for our sins" is the "good news" 
of the Christian revelation. The gist of New 
Testament teaching is that man is a sinner, 
alienated from God, and that the work of Christ 
was to reconcile God and man — to make at-one- 
ment. The original motive behind the mani- 
festation of the Son of God is declared to have 
been the love of God ; the purpose, the salvation 
of men from sin and spiritual death to holiness 
and eternal life; the method, God's incarnation 
of Himself as man, suffering in, with, and for 
His world, thus laying the foundation of recon- 
51 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

ciliation between Himself and His human crea- 
tures. 

The cross is very properly the symbol of the 
Christian faith; for in its underlying principle 
is to be seen the meaning of God's work for us 
in the person of His Son, who is "the human 
life of God." There is nothing in the atone- 
ment that is not in the cross of Christ. If we 
understand, therefore, the spiritual principle of 
the cross, we shall understand, as far as we can 
ever understand the deep things of God, the 
principle of the atonement; for at the cross 
God and man meet and are at-one, alienation 
ceases, reconciliation is complete. 

"In the cross of Christ I glory, 

Towering o'er the wrecks of time; 
All the light of sacred story 
Gathers round its head sublime." 



CHAPTER V 

The Cosmic Cross 

"The Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
world."— Rev. 13:8. 



Chapter V 
THE COSMIC CROSS 

THEORIES of atonement are devised to 
reconcile the two great moral attributes 
of God — His holiness and His love, in 
view of man's sin. How can God be both "just 
and the Justifier?" Justice and mercy have 
seemed to be almost irreconcilable enemies — op- 
posites which could never be made to harmonize ; 
for justice would seem to be the infliction of the 
penalty, mercy its remission. 

An attempt will be made in these studies 
to show that Christ Jesus is Himself the re- 
vealed reconciliation of these two seemingly con- 
tradictory attributes of God; that in Him the 
holy love of God comes to its highest mani- 
festation; that in Him certain cosmic laws find 
their fulfillment and their harmony. It may 
seem at first that the discussion is taking us 
far afield; but all paths will, we hope, meet at 
the Cross. 

55 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

At the very first, therefore, let it be empha- 
sized that the cross is not something which has 
been superimposed upon this human world. It 
has not rudely burst into the cosmic system like 
a flaming meteor coming from unknown regions 
beyond our planetary system, startling us a 
while, then passing out of all relation to us. 
The cross of Christ is the focus where funda- 
mental and primal cosmic laws, seemingly di- 
vergent, meet and harmonize, as the dissevered 
colors of the spectrum may be gathered by a 
prism into one harmonious ray of white light. 
The cross is the culmination of the age-long 
cosmic process, the fulfilling of the law, not an 
artificial device to beat the world or the devil, 
or to lay a flattering unction to the divine con- 
science; for, indeed, some theories of the atone- 
ment come nigh unto making God guilty of the 
subterfuges by which a Chinamian "saves his 
face." 

If the Creator has been vitally in His world 
from the beginning until now, certainly we 
should expect the cosmos to express that in- 
dwelling Mind. While humanity, as the upper 
56 



THE COSMIC CROSS 

stratum of earthly creation, would reasonably 
be expected to manifest most clearly the divine 
thought or word, it would be strange indeed if 
all lower strata of creation should speak no 
whisper of God's moral character. The New 
Testament insists that the Christ is the Word 
of God through whom and unto whom all things 
have been created. "All things were made 
through Him, and without Him was not any- 
thing made that hath been miade . . . and 
the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us 
. . . full of grace and truth." (John.) 
' ' God hath at the end of these days spoken unto 
us in His Son . . . through whom also He 
made the worlds." (Author of Hebrews.) "The 
Son of His love in whom; we have our redemp- 
tion, the forgiveness of our sins: who is the 
image of the invisible God, the first born of 
all creation ; for in Him were all things created, 
in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible 
and invisible ... all things have been cre- 
ated through Him and unto Him; and He is 
before all things, and in Him all things con- 
sist." (Paul.) 

57 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

What can these great sayings mean, if not 
that the Christ of history is the human incar- 
nation and focusing of the Logos that is in all 
creation from the beginning? The Christ-prin- 
ciple is, according to the Scriptures, in the whole 
cosmos. The divine thought and character are 
on all things created. "Heaven and earth are 
full of His glory" — that is, His character. "He 
was in the world, and the world was made 
through Him ; ' ' but, though He has always been 
here, "the world knew Him not," because of its 
spiritual blindness. 

Certainly, then, the cross is more than an 
incident of human history at a point of time. 
It is a cosmic principle; and this is what gives 
the death of Jesus its tremendous significance. 



58 



CHAPTER VI 

The Cosmic Root of Holiness 

"If we are faithless, He abideth faithful; 
for He can not deny Himself." — 2 Tim. 2:13. 



Chapter VI 
THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

THE biologist has discovered the parallel 
operation of two fundamental laws, the 
first being the law of the Struggle for 
Life, and the second, the law of the Struggle for 
the Life of Others. In these two equally im- 
portant and primary laws of nature, I believe, 
are to be found the germ and the lower stages 
of what, in the moral sphere, we call Holiness 
and Love. 

The first of these biological laws to attract 
the attention of scientists was the Struggle for 
Life and the Survival of the Fittest. Darwin's 
name will forever be associated with the exposi- 
tion of this hw in the "Origin of Species." 
Darwinianism has been greatly modified and 
added to by later investigation; other factors 
in the evolutionary process besides natural selec- 
tion have been discovered and are now empha- 
sized; but the great law which Darwin ex- 
61 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

pounded still holds its place as one of the prem- 
ises of biology. 

What is this law? Briefly this: (1) Living 
substance, called Protoplasm, has a native tend- 
ency to vary. Organisms made of protoplasmic 
cells vary from one another. The offspring is 
always a little different from the parents, one 
seed or one child differing from another, even 
of the same parentage. 

(2) The second fact is, that every living be- 
ing begins its life in a certain environment. 
Enveloping it are air, light, heat, and other 
things in varying conditions and quantities. It 
must eat; and there are some things it can eat, 
and some it can not. There are certain physical 
and chemical facts which it meets. Every living 
creature is not sufficient unto itself, but is a 
related being — related to a complex world. 

(3) The third fact is that in order to live 
and reproduce, a living being must be more or 
less in harmony with its environment. It must 
be "reconciled." "Alienation" from its world, 
by lack of adaptation to the factors upon which 
its being depends, is death. If it can endure 

62 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

the degree of light, or temperature, for instance, 
in which it is placed, if it can assimilate any 
of the matter about it as food, if it can resist 
successfully its living enemies, it can live and 
reproduce. If it be ill-adapted to its world, it 
dies. 

(4) Another fact is that, in the endless vari- 
ations among living beings, some are natively 
better adapted to endure stress upon their 
powers of resistance than others. In times when 
the stress is great the "fittest," that is, those 
that fit the best, live, while others die. Those 
that live reproduce, and, by the law that the 
characteristics of parents are likely to be trans- 
mitted to offspring, those characteristics that 
best fit living beings to their world are passed 
on to accumulate as the generations come and 
go. Thus comes about a "selection" by nature 
of the beings that best fit their environment. 

An illustration may help to make this law 
clearer to those unaccustomed to biological study. 
How did the giraffe get his long neck and fore- 
legs? The history of his peculiarities can be 
imagined thus: Mr. Darwin assumes that the 
63 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

ancestors of the giraffe doubtless had neck and 
forelegs of ordinary length, like an antelope. 
It was a grazing or browsing animal. Its habitat 
is a land subject to severe droughts, so that 
occasionally all herbage except the tall, deeply- 
rooted trees is dried up. In such cases, if these 
short-necked grazing and browsing animals 
could not reach the leaves of tall shrubs and 
trees, they must perish. But if some happened 
to have little longer necks or forelegs, or both, 
it can readily be seen that they could survive 
the longest, because they could reach the highest. 
These fortunate survivors would be the only ones 
left to perpetuate their species. By the law of 
heredity their offspring would tend to the pos- 
session of long necks and forelegs. Besides, these 
long necks and legs give the animal the ability 
to detect an enemy. So after many generations, 
during which this selective process was going 
on, long necks and forelegs became the fashion 
in giraffe society. 

This is what is meant by the terms, ' ' Strug- 
gle for Life," "Survival of the Fittest," and 
' ' Natural Selection. ' ' Now it can be easily seen 
64 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

that there is a steady tendency in nature to 
produce fitness or harmony between the organ- 
ism and its world. Either the environment will 
modify the organism, or else the organism will 
modify the environment. To change the lan- 
guage, the aim of nature seems to be reconcilia- 
tion, or at-one-ment, between the living creature 
and the great universe in which it lives, moves, 
and has its being. To be out of harmony with 
environment is the biological sin the wages of 
which is death. 

Does this law operate in the human sphere? 
Doubtless. In primitive ages when man was 
barely man this biological law prevailed, and his 
body, according to the evolutionary theory, is 
the product of the forces that operate according 
to this law. When man ascended, by the evolu- 
tion of his brain, into the world of mind, he 
"was enabled to respond to new things in his 
environment. The moment he laid hold of the 
first tool or weapon, man entered upon a new 
world and a new era in his progress. The evo- 
lution of his body was arrested, the evolution 
of thought began. When he came to the tool- 
5 65 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

using point of his bodily development there was 
little further need for adaptation to environment 
by changes in the mechanism of the body. 
Adaptation and change were now transferred 
from the body to the tool, and henceforth sur- 
vival depended on the possession of the fittest 
tool or weapon — upon handiwork rather than 
upon the hand. Survival amidst unfriendly cir- 
cumstances then depended not on adaptation of 
body, but upon the human mind ; and the strug- 
gle for life under the law of selection was lifted 
into the realm of intellect. 

The history of civilization is the story of 
that selection. Everywhere the races having the 
most mind have prevailed over the races of dull 
intellect. "We are in the very midst of that 
process to-day. Aryans displaced the aborigines 
of India and of America because of superior 
mind. Greeks successfully resisted Persia not 
because of superior equipment or greater num- 
bers, but because of higher intelligence. Rome 
crushed Carthage for the same reason. The 
American navy sunk the fleets of Spain in the 
recent war because the Yankees had keener in- 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

tellects, less clouded by hurtful personal habits, 
steadier nerve, greater power of personal self- 
control and self -direction. Manila and Santiago 
were battles of brains more than of bombs and 
bullets. The war between Japan and Russia was 
an issue between minds rather than battalions. 
Russia depended on the brute force of heavy 
battalions; Japan, rather, on carefully planned 
campaigns and strategy. Brains won. 

Industry is the modern phase of the ancient 
struggle. Here, too, it is a battle of brains, and, 
speaking generally, the fittest survive. It re- 
quires a high grade of intellect to fit into this 
age of intricate and dangerous machinery. Just 
anybody can not run a locomotive, a linotype, 
or an airship. Just anybody can not master the 
intricacies of a telephone system, an insurance 
company, or high finance. The dull mind is 
out of harmony with the modern industrial sys- 
tem, and must lag in the race. Were it not for 
the operation of certain forces, moral, social, 
and physiological, dull-minded human beings 
would be swiftly eliminated by the stern law 
of the selection of the mentally fittest. Even 
67 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

as it is, in spite of certain counteracting forces, 
the "child races," — that is, the races of low in- 
telligence — are being slowly eliminated, and 
where these races refuse to adapt themselves 
to modern environment, the sentence of death is 
already pronounced. American Indians, native 
Australians, South Sea Islanders, and native 
Hawaiians are obvious examples. "Think, or 
die" is the stern demand of this industrial and 
commercial age. To succeed in holding a place 
in our modern system of things one must be 
reconciled to, be at one with, the demands of an 
intellectual environment. Incompetency is the 
industrial sin the wages of which is death. 

There is still another mighty factor in the 
environment of a human being — the ethical 
factor. The moral system is no less a reality 
than are the biological and industrial systems. 
Generally speaking, vice tends to limit offspring. 
The French people, as a nation, have been ad- 
dicted to certain immoralities, with the result 
that the birth rate is steadily decreasing. Ab- 
sinthe and adultery are doing their deadly work. 
Unworthy social ambitions of "society women" 
68 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

make children a nuisance. Even on the human 
side of the moral law the demand of our social 
and industrial world is exacting. The moral en- 
vironment in the form of statutory law forbids 
murder. Defy that demand of ethical environ- 
ment : what is the result ? You are immediately 
taken out of the social world by hanging or 
imprisonment. The business world demands 
honesty — however much appearances contradict 
the statement. Credit is the foundation of mod- 
ern business, and truthfulness is the foundation 
of credit. At least ninety per cent of modern 
business is done on credit. To make this pos- 
sible there must be a tremendous fund of hon- 
esty stored in the souls of men. A prominent 
American banker has said: "If an inhabitant 
of another planet could come to one of our big 
cities, perhaps he at first would find it ruled 
by the law of selfishness, the almighty dollar. 
Later, he would find underneath all the silent 
forces of righteousness. The power which sus- 
tains the business world is individual character. ' ' 
He who doubts that honesty is the founda- 
tion of the tremendous business structure of 
69 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

modern times should test the matter by robbing 
a till, embezzling funds, forging a note, juggling 
with the accounts of a public office, or doing 
dishonest labor, if nothing else will convince 
him. Of course, the rascal is not always caught, 
or convicted; but society has constructed an 
elaborate legal machine to catch and punish him, 
if possible, and he must be exceptionally shrewd 
or powerful to escape. And if he is caught, 
what is done? He is deprived of life — not al- 
ways his personal life; but he is deprived of 
some of his wealth, of liberty, of the esteem of 
his fellow-men, or of a place in the economic 
world — all of which are essential to the life 
which distinguishes a man from a beast. The 
wages of social sin is social death. 

There is more than this in the case. It is a 
peculiar fact, that although the immoral person 
escapes the clutches of human law, and continues 
to live in worldly prosperity, his immoral doings 
cause him to be strangely ill at ease with him- 
self. His conscience hurts him. Two discordant 
voices jangle in his soul, one accusing, the other 
excusing. He is conscious of being "wrong, in- 
70 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

ferior, and unhappy." Independent of the 
purely social environment, there seems to be a 
strange, impalpable, spiritual world that lies 
very close to our souls. There is ever with us, 
if we are normal human beings, a sense of ought- 
ness. A higher Something, some "Over-Soul" 
attends us. A spiritual atmosphere out of which 
speak whispers of approval and of disapproval 
lies closer to us than breathing. What is that 
supersensuous environment but God Himself, 
who is in and through and above and under all 
things, as ether is said to pervade all grosser 
matter ? 

To be out of harmony with the recognized 
ethical demands of the social human world and 
with the demands of the spiritual world, as 
expressed through the conscience, is sin. The 
sinner is one who is unreconciled to his moral 
and spiritual environment. He is an outcast, 
"alienated from the life of God" and from 
fellowship with humanity. This alienation is 
spiritual death. The realization of this lack 
of harmony between ourselves and moral re- 
quirements is what is called "conviction for 
71 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

sin," wherein the soul is disturbed and thrown 
out of equilibrium just as the body is disturbed 
by being plunged into physical surroundings to 
which it is not adapted. 

Holiness, on the other hand, is the harmony 
of the human soul with its social and religious 
duty. It is fitness, adaptedness, correspondence 
with spiritual environment. The result is a sense 
of reconciliation and peace. It is righteousness, 
peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. It is to love 
God with all one's might, and the neighbor as 
oneself. 

It is not far-fetched, therefore, in view of 
the preceding discussion, to say that holiness is 
the highest manifestation of the cosmic law of 
the struggle for life and the survival of the 
fittest. The ideal person is one who best fits his 
world, viewed in its completeness. Only a whole 
man lives a complete life, and he only is com- 
plete who fits not only into the physical and 
intellectual environment, but also into the super- 
sensuous realities of the moral and spiritual 
world. This latter aspect of wholeness is called 
holiness. 

72 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

Jesus is the one human being who was from 
the beginning of His life continuously in per- 
fect accord with the spiritual world. He is the 
apex of humanity — the fulfillment or completion 
of the cosmic law of required fitness manifested 
in the struggle for life and the survival of the 
fit. The law of self-preservation finds its high- 
est and noblest instance in Him who came not 
to destroy the law, but to fulfill it. In Him 
we see a human being perfectly reconciled to 
the Father; and in being like Him we find the 
life eternal. 

To say, however, that Jesus was continuously 
in accord with the spiritual world should not 
imply that strain was never put upon His spir- 
itual nature by His sensuous nature. His senses 
and His soul were often in conflict. Otherwise 
He could not have suffered temptation. He 
could not have been a normal human being with- 
out that experience of tension between sense and 
spirit, between the real and the ideal. That 
tension was so great in Gethsemane that He 
sweat drops of blood. His perfect accord was 
with the will of God, not with the actual con- 
73 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

ditions He found in the world, nor with the 
world of sense. He could not be in perfect 
accord with these two often opposing sets of 
conditions at the same time. 

With the actual human world in which Jesus 
found Himself He was not in harmony. Sin 
was here. Here were covetousness, lascivious- 
ness, hate, envy, cruelty, and the whole dire list. 
Into this poisoned air Jesus came, and found a 
moral climate to which He could never become 
acclimated. The prevailing spirit of His age He 
opposed with all His might. He was a deter- 
mined nonconformist. His words and life an- 
tagonized animalism and all subtler forms of 
selfishness. He antagonized mlany of the social 
and religious practices of the times. He de- 
nounced in no soft language the spirit of the 
Pharisee and the agnostic creed of the Sadducee. 
His kindness and the transparent purity of His 
life rebuked all hard-heartedness and moral un- 
cleanness. His democracy rebuked the aristo- 
cratic spirit which sneered because He ate with 
publicans and sinners and allowed a repentant 
harlot to touch His person. He was unrecon- 
74 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

ciled to the world as He found it, and the world 
was unreconciled to Him. 

What was the result? The immediate result 
was what has always happened when any being 
is out of joint with its surroundings: He was 
crushed out of the world, killed by a hostile 
environment. Sin slew Him, as the miasma of 
the swamp kills the child whose lungs were made 
for mountain air. Sin — the self-will of man, 
crossing holiness — the will of God, made the 
cross of Christ. Accordingly the cross makes 
clear revelation of the nature of holiness and of 
the nature of sin. It shows the fact that un- 
regenerate humanity is unfriendly to God's 
highest purpose for man ; that the sensuous ele- 
ment of human life is often at cross purposes 
with spiritual human life ; that ' ' the mind of the 
flesh is enmity against God." 

The teaching of human experience and of 
the Christian Scriptures is that humanity is 
natively out of key, at least in a large measure, 
with the character and will of God, and that 
we remain out of key until we are born of the 
Spirit. Whether God made us so is apart from 
75 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

the question. The fact remains that we are. 
The flesh and the spirit are often caught in the 
act not only of pulling against each other, but 
also against the will of God. Paul gives a vivid 
description of this battle in the seventh chapter 
of Romans. In Corinthians he says, "The 
natural (or sensuous) man receiveth not the 
things of the Spirit of God: for they are fool- 
ishness unto Him; and He can not know them, 
because they are spiritually judged." And 
Jesus said, "Except a man be born anew (or 
from above), he can not see the Kingdom of 
God." 

Wherefore, while the cross of Christ reveals 
as nothing else could the nature of man's sin, 
and at the same time the unbending righteous- 
ness of God, j'et the matter does not end with 
that; for while the cross is the inevitable out- 
come of the disharmony between God and sinful 
humanity, yet by means of the cross is recon- 
ciliation between God and man to be effected, 
and to be effected by changing man. This change 
in human nature does not, indeed, remove all 
tension between the sensuous and the spiritual in 
76 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

man, but it does remove antagonism between the 
will of man and the will of God. Christ ener- 
gizes the spiritual in man to the point of mastery 
over the lower elements of human nature, or, 
as Paul expresses it, by His Spirit puts to death 
the deeds of the body and makes the soul alive 
unto God. Jesus came to make it possible for 
a godlike human being to exist and be happy 
in this world, not by toning down the moral 
standard to fit unspiritual people, but by tuning 
up the morals of humanity to harmonize with 
the character of God. He came to take away the 
sin of the world by rectifying man's will. The 
mission of Jesus, both in His life and in His 
death, was not to make any change in the higher 
environment of man's soul. That is nothing 
less than the character and will of God, which 
can not be altered. God's will for the individual 
and for society must remain constant. The work 
of Jesus is to transform human souls and social 
systems into conformity with the will of God, 
and so make peace. "God was in Christ recon- 
ciling the world unto Himself." How this 
reconciliation is accomplished by the cross of 
77 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

Christ will be discussed in a later chapter on 
"The Power of the Cross." 

There can be no peace between a holy God 
and a sinful soul until the sinner consents to 
adapt himself to the moral demands of the uni- 
verse. I say consents, because the reconciliation 
does not wait until the adaptation is complete, 
but is effected the instant the personal surrender 
to God is made. Keconciliation, therefore, is 
dependent on repentance and faith. 

What the discussion has been leading up to 
is this — and it can not be too strongly empha- 
sized: In the process of getting God and man 
together, the change in attitude must be in man, 
not in God. The character of God is an un- 
changing fact, the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever. 

1 ' I, Jehovah, change not. ' ' — Mai. 3 : 6. 

"God is not a man, that He should lie; 
neither the son of man, that He should repent: 
hath He said, and will He not do it? or hath 
He spoken, and will He not make it good?" — 
Num. 23 : 19. 

With the Father of lights there can be "no 
78 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

variation, neither shadow that is cast by turn- 
ing. ' ' God must be just ; that is, He must ren- 
der to every man according to his works: "to 
them that by patience in well-doing . . . 
eternal life: but to them that are factious, and 
obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, 
shall be wrath and indignation." (Rom. 2:7.) 
To . those who have the spirit of willing con- 
formity to His law, Cod is love and mercy; but 
to those who exalt their own wills above the 
Universal Will, God is a consuming fire. Any 
creature that violates the law of its own being 
must suffer the consequences. Law is inexorable. 
The way of the transgressor is hard, and God 
will never make it any easier. "The wages of 
sin is death. ' ' The law of God being inexorable 
as the character of God, with which it is iden- 
tical, every creature must adapt itself or die. 
God remains true though every man should be 
a liar. Neither in nature nor in morals does 
God temper the wind to the shorn lamb: He 
;empers the lamb to the cold wind. Therefore, 
if atonement or reconciliation is to be effected, 
the change must be in the spiritual organism, 
79 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

not in the spiritual environment — in man, not 
in God. 

It can not be too forcibly emphasized, in 
these times of easy-going and sentimental the- 
ology and of similar morality, that God is Law 
as well as Love. We have swung, I think, too 
far away from the stern puritanic sense of moral 
obligation. If the Puritan's God was too severe, 
ours is too sentimental. If the Calvinist of the 
older type exaggerated God's sovereignty, many 
now exaggerate the human will, and are raising 
the misleading slogan of "Personal Liberty," 
which is coming to mean personal license. If 
the God of the seventeenth century was too 
sternly masculine, the God of the twentieth is 
too feminine, in evidence of which I call to 
witness that emasculated theology called Chris- 
tian Science, that mouths persistently that God 
is love, but "love" sapped of all discipline and 
ethical content. Along with this emasculation 
of theology has come a growing dullness in the 
popular sense of the sacredness of all law, hu- 
man and divine. The greatest civic and political 
issue before the American Commonwealth to- 
80 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

day is law-enforcement; for growing disregard 
for law is a menace recognized by all thoughtful 
citizens. Executive officers to-day run on plat- 
forms for or against the enforcement of law — 
an issue that should never be raised; for there 
is logically, legally, morally but one side to that 
question. But the fact that the popular vote 
divides on that issue, often resulting in the elec- 
tion of the candidate who publicly announces 
beforehand that he will not enforce certain laws, 
is alarming evidence that we need to revive our 
sense of civic and moral obligation to law. "We 
need more sermons on fearing God and keeping 
His commandments. We need to reinstate in our 
theology a God whose will is law, and who 
can not be mocked by sentimental reliance on 
His mercy apart from our willingness to obey 
His plain requirements. Margaret Fuller some- 
where once wrote, rather patronizingly, "I ac- 
cept the universe," as if the universe should 
be flattered by the acceptance. Rough old 
Thomas Carlyle, when he heard it, exclaimed, 
"Gad, she 'd better!" We had better make the 
law of God the head of the corner, or expect 
6 81 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

the alternative of having it fall upon us and 
grind us to powder. 

The cross of Christ is, first of all, therefore, 
a revelation of the inexorableness of God's law, 
of the unchanging holiness of God. God must 
always be what He is. His very name is ' ' I AM 
THAT I AM." His law is simply Himself ex- 
pressed, and He can not ignore law, because He 
must be Himself. To abrogate, suspend, or break 
His own law would be to violate the principles 
of His own being — and that would be to sin. 
The life and death of Jesus show that God will 
not step aside from His law — will not modify 
His loving and righteous demands. Rather than 
do that, Jesus loses would-be disciples, bidding 
them count the cost; refuses to turn stone into 
bread, and at last marches steadily to cruci- 
fixion rather than depart from holiness. The 
cross shows God upholding "the dignity of His 
own law" — although not in the sense in which 
advocates of the Eectoral or Governmental 
theory of the atonement use that phrase. It 
reveals that God will never change His own 
character to save any sinner, nor a whole uni- 
82 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

verse of sinners. In fact, He could not have 
deviated from His own character and at the 
same time have saved us; for God's character 
in man is salvation. Christ could not, therefore, 
be the Savior if He had been disloyal to the 
character of God. He would have been a sinner 
like the rest of us. 

Man's salvation depended on Christ's main- 
taining the integrity of the divine character. If 
Christ, for instance, had yielded to the tempta- 
tion to win the homage of the people by the 
acrobatic feat of jumping off the pinnacle of the 
temple without personal injury, what good moral 
or spiritual result would have followed? The 
only result would have been the admiration of 
a gaping crowd similar to the admiration of the 
sporting world for a prize-fighter or an aeronaut. 
If He had let Himself down from the godlike 
purpose of winning supremacy over the spirits 
of men solely by the power of His own moral 
and spiritual excellence, and had yielded to the 
subtle suggestion to secure power first by polit- 
ical influence, the whole battle for the salvation 
of the soul of man would have been lost. God 
83 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

must win by the power of character alone, or 
not at all; and whatever miracles Christ per- 
forms must be not feats to gain the admiring 
wonder of an unspiritual multitude, but "signs" 
or indications of the divine character. 

The cross is the undeniable evidence of the 
divine self-respect. Between sin and the cross, 
Christ chooses the cross, and thus meets the de- 
mands of His own holy character. In the death 
of the Divine-human Savior on Calvary, God 
"satisfies" Himself, offers Himself as an "obla- 
tion" or "propitiation" to the demands of His 
own moral being, as every martyr to conscience 
has done who has followed in His steps. 

Although this self-propitiation of the divine 
character is as far above anything human as 
God is above man, yet it is not something alto- 
gether apart from the facts of human experi- 
ence. In fact, it derives its meaning from its 
adumbration in human experience. The ocean 
is incomparably greater than a drop of spray, 
but the difference is one of degree, not of kind — 
of quantity, not quality. 

History glows with instances of this moral 
84 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

phenomenon of self-propitiation. In fact, self- 
sacrifice, even unto death, for the sake of pre- 
serving the integrity of the moral nature is 
the supremely interesting element of history. 
Joseph, wrenching himself away from the se- 
ductive wife of Potiphar in order to preserve his 
own chaste soul, and being imprisoned as a 
consequence; Daniel, deliberately defying the 
mouths of lions in fidelity to his religion; his 
three friends, choosing to be cast into the fiery 
furnace rather than to degrade themselves and 
dishonor their God by bowing to the golden idol ; 
Moses, "choosing rather to share ill-treatment 
with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleas- 
ures of sin for a season," are all familiar Old 
Testament examples of self-sacrifice for the pro- 
pitiation and preservation of the spiritual self. 
The martyrs of Christian history, from Stephen 
to the Chinese Christians in the Boxer uprising, 
who, with moral grandeur unsurpassed, saw their 
children hideously tortured before their eyes, 
and submitted themselves to be hacked to pieces 
by inches rather than be disloyal to Christ, shine 
with the glory of the divine nature. Their un- 
85 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

speakable torture was the cross of self-propitia- 
tion, an oblation and sacrifice to the demands 
of the soul. Tolstoi, renouncing all he had — 
property, income, title of nobility, social pres- 
tige, fleshly pleasures and passions. — in the effort 
to satisfy the demands of a soul that had been 
transformed by the vision of the Christ, is a 
most impressive modern exhibition of the stern 
law of self-propitiation. How sublime appears 
the human soul when it grandly pays such a 
price for the preservation of its own integrity! 
The "Loyal Self" is the most interesting and 
significant element in all history — and the most 
godlike. 

Paradoxical as it seems, therefore, Christ's 
death was the price of His self-preservation. 
All His life He was grievously tempted to turn 
aside from righteousness ; but never once did He 
turn to the right hand or to the left. He had a 
work to do, a character to maintain, a soul to 
preserve. He might have receded from His po- 
sitions, and been disloyal to His ideals; but in 
that case He would have put to death His God- 
hood and His highest manhood. To sacrifice 
86 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

moral principle for lower ends is to perish at 
the very top of our nature. Jesus might have 
saved His earthly life by swerving from the 
straight course of truth and duty ; but He would 
have lost His spiritual life and also failed in 
His saving mission if He had abandoned His 
principles and His purposes. He saved Himself 
and us by losing His earthly life; and in so 
doing He also condemned and defeated the sin 
that tempted and the sin that crucified Him ; for 
' ' Good meeting evil and remaining untainted by 
it can alone conquer evil." (Tolstoi.) 

One voice that sings triumphantly from the 
cross is that of Duty — 

"Stern Daughter of the Voice of God, . . . 
Thou who art victory and law 
When empty terrors overawe." 

It is a voice that appeals to the heroic in human 
life, bidding the soul to its own self be true in 
spite of toil, pain, and danger. The cross is 
the fitting badge for the hero, the proper ensign 
of the Crusader in any holy cause, and of the 
drudging bondman of duty in the humble walks 
87 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

of life ; for it stands for the supremacy of right- 
eousness, conscience, duty, for the sovereignty 
of the soul. "Grace and truth came by Jesus 
Christ : ' ' not grace alone, but truth also, and the 
personal character that is at all hazards loyal to 
truth. He who, following the example of Jesus, 
seeks first the Kingdom of God and His right- 
eousness, wears the cross on his heart; for who- 
ever exalts truth and duty to first place in his 
life must crucify the flesh and the lusts thereof, 
and he will often be called upon to offer up his 
lower nature as an oblation and propitiation to 
the demands of a righteous soul. The cross is, 
therefore, the eternal symbol of the "Loyal 
Self." 

"If any man would come after Me, let him 
deny himself, and take up his cross and follow 
Me. For whosoever would save his life shall 
lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for My 
sake shall find it." 

This self-preservation or self-propitiation, 
manifested at the cross, however, was not for the 
mere satisfaction of the divine nature. "Christ 
88 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF HOLINESS 

died for us." He made "propitiation for our 
sins." "For their sakes I sanctify Myself." 
Christ was loyal to Himself for our sakes ; for 
by being thus true to the character of God, He 
became the Light of the world by which we can 
find our way to salvation and peace. This leads 
to the second part of the discussion, in which 
an attempt will be made to show that God's 
righteousness and His love blend in one; that 
His character is love; and that His holiness 
consists in fidelity to that character of love; 
that God abideth faithful to Himself "for our 
sakes." 



89 



CHAPTER VII 

The Cosmic Root of Love 

"God is love."—! John 4:8. 



Chapter VII 
THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

THE other great law of animate nature — no 
less fundamental and original than the 
law of selection and the struggle for life 
— is the law of self-sacrifice for the life of others, 
or the law of love. It is often said that "Self- 
preservation is the first law of nature ; ' ' but 
that is incorrect. Self-preservation and race- 
preservation are two parallel laws of nature, or, 
better, two intertwining laws; for they so react, 
back and forth, now one dominant, now the 
other, in the activities of an individual that 
they are inextricably tangled together. 

The struggle for the life of others begins 
down very low in the scale of animate creation. 
In fact, suggestions of the law are found in the 
inorganic realm. What is that passionate af- 
finity of atoms for those of another element, or 
of atoms of the same element for one another, 
but a demonstration of the fact that nothing 
93 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

lives unto itself or for itself ? Everything seems 
to live not for itself alone, but for something 
else, and realizes itself by merging itself into 
a larger whole. It finds itself by losing itself. 

In the animate world this law finds its first 
manifestation in connection with the function 
of reproduction. Everywhere in nature the 
mother gives up something of her own life for 
her offspring. In the lowest protean forms of 
plant and animal the mother-cell simply divides 
to produce another cell ; while in the more highly 
organized forms it seems that the chief aim of 
the life of the individual is to produce and to 
care for other individuals. 

Take, for illustration, a flowering plant. In 
its beginnings it seems purely selfish. During 
its germination it grows by the disorganizing 
and appropriation of the sheltering seed. After 
it has absorbed the nutritious tissues of the 
mother-seed and has produced a root and leaf 
of its own, it reaches into the soil and into the 
air and sunlight, appropriating everything it can 
use for its own nutrition. 

But watch it: it is going somewhere. Buds 
94 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

for next year's foliage and blossom are form- 
ing" in the axils of its leaves, and the plant is 
carefully and ingeniously protecting these little 
buds. Then it comes to the blossom, and we 
observe this plant we thought had been growing 
in pure selfishness carefully nourishing the little 
ovules in its ovary until they are full-groAvn 
seeds ready to begin again this cycle of life. 
Having performed this function of nourishing, 
perfecting, and protecting its own seed-children, 
the mother plant dies, or goes into its periodic 
rest. 

In the light of this result we see that the 
main purpose of the whole process from the 
beginning, though apparently selfish for much 
of the time, is at last to pour its life into the 
life of its offspring. The ultimate goal of the 
growing plant is not its own life, but the nurture 
of the seed. Every cell division, every differ- 
entiation of tissue into root, stem, leaf, flower, 
was for the one crowning event — the production 
and nurture of another living being. Some of 
my peach trees have literally laid down their 
lives in the effort to bear more fruit than their 
95 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

vitality could endure. In this familiar process 
of fruit-bearing the chief purpose of the indi- 
vidual seems to be to preserve not itself pri- 
marily, but the species. The individual merges 
itself into the race, gives up its individual being 
for the life of the larger circle of beings. In 
all this there is no conscious effort, of course; 
it is a purely instinctive tendency breathed into 
the protoplasm of which the plant is made. But 
who breathed upon the protoplasm, and knew 
the plant's members and processes when as yet 
there was none of them? What is this mys- 
terious thing we call "function," if not the 
Mind of the Spirit of Life— the Will of the 
living God? Function is spiritual purpose that 
guides in the organization of all living matter, 
an intelligent Something that gathers and molds 
inorganic matter to its will. Its immediate pur- 
pose seems to be self-preservation by nutrition; 
its final purpose is self-sacrifice for the lives of 
others. 

There is also another aspect of the vicarious 
principle in the vegetable kingdom. Why should 
plants live and grow at all? Is it worth while 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

for them to go through this eternal cycle of 
growth and reproduction? No, unless some 
higher purpose is served. That higher purpose 
is the furnishing of food for animals. All ani- 
mal life depends on vegetable life. The cow 
eats grass, and man eats the cow and drinks 
her milk. Herbage gives up its life to build 
a higher order of life. 

Professor William James, in his essay, "Is 
Life Worth Living?" has turned this fact of 
the sacrifice of the lower for the benefit of the 
higher to good moral advantage in this striking 
paragraph : ' ' Realize how many innocent beasts 
have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter- 
pens and lay down their lives that we might 
grow up, all fattened and clad. Does not the 
acceptance of a happy life upon such terms in- 
volve a point of honor? Are we not bound to 
take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some 
self-denying service with our lives, in return for 
all those lives upon which ours are built?" 

The higher the order of life, the more definite 
is the vicarious principle. In the animal king- 
dom the operation of this principle is still more 
1 97 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

obvious than in the vegetable kingdom. Among 
animals the more dependent and helpless the 
offspring is when coming into the world, and 
the longer that period of helplessness, the more 
clearly is the vicarious principle manifested. A 
hen is almost pure coward and egoist, looking 
out solely for her own welfare, until she begins 
to sit; then she becomes vigorously combative 
in defense of her nest. When the helpless chicks 
arrive the selfish hen has become completely 
transformed from a shy, timorous, gluttonous 
fowl to a courageous, combative ball of fuss and 
feathers, daring to fight an enemy twenty times 
her size; and, in her tender care for her little 
ones, she will not eat, though she be half starved 
from her long fasting, until the little chicks 
have eaten their fill. Now she is all unselfish- 
ness, losing herself in the helpless lives of others. 

"Though Nature, red in tooth and claw 
"With ravine, shrieks against our creed — " 

yet Nature has other voices than a shriek. She 
sings also the lover's song and the mother's lul- 
laby. Bloody sacrifice, heartless cruelty, pain, 
98 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

savagery, and selfishness exist; but even in the 
sub-human world we see, both in plant and ani- 
mal, the heart of the mother, self -forgetful de- 
votion to the life of another. In a word, 
love is there in embryo. The brute mother 
will in many instances sacrifice her life for 
her offspring ; the male will, in numberless cases, 
fight both for his young and for his mate. 
Self-sacrifice for the lives of others is a law 
of nature; and if precedence is to be given to 
either, it must be given, even in the sub-human 
world, to loving self-sacrifice rather than to self- 
preservation ; for everywhere we see the indi- 
vidual losing itself in the race, subordinating 
its own life to the perpetuation of the species. 
In the animate creation below man, however, 
the scope of the struggle for the life of others 
is limited to a comparatively narrow circle — 
to the relation between mates, or parent and off- 
spring, or, in many cases, between members of 
the same colony, as among bees and ants. Bees 
will defend their hive with their own lives. Ants 
toil with indefatigable industry for the colony, 
and will often care tenderly for a wounded mem- 
99 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

ber of the colony. Outside of these narrow 
circles, as far as I know, the law does not operate 
to any considerable extent, although instances 
can be found where it does. The law is in the 
sub-human sphere, but it is not fulfilled. 

Much wider is the scope of the operation of 
this principle of altruism in the human world. 
How large a place vicarious self-sacrifice fills in 
ordinary human life ! Love stories comprise at 
least nine-tenths of all fictitious literature, and 
fiction is by far the most popular of all forms of 
literature, partly because the prevailing topic is 
love. How divinely self -forgetful is the love of 
a pure maiden for a gallant youth ! Borneo and 
Juliet is true to the human heart at its best. 
True love between the sexes is an exhibition of 
the law of finding life by losing it. Love lives 
by self-sacrifice, gets by giving. 

Still more beautiful, more divinely bright, is 
the love of parent and child. What is more 
typical of divinity than David mourning for 
Absalom ? Where can be found a more pathetic 
expression of the vicarious principle in the hu- 
man heart than the heart-breaking lament: "0 
100 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! 
would I had died for thee, Absalom, my son, 
my son ! ' ' 

The peculiarity of the affection existing be- 
tween human parents and offspring is that it 
normally outlasts life, often with increasing 
depth and tenderness. Especially is this in- 
crease of affection shown in the love of children 
toward the parent; for grown children often 
exhibit a devotion to their parents which they 
did not have in early life. Maternal feeling 
among brutes generally terminates with weaning. 
After that the offspring is generally treated by 
the mother as a heathen and a publican. A 
weaned colt is no dearer to the dam than is any 
other horse. Not so with human parenthood. 
Parental or filial affection is normally a senti- 
ment lasting through life and longer. Devotion 
does not die with dependence the one on the 
other. Nothing human is so enduring, so for- 
getful of self, so forgiving, so vicarious, as 
mother-love. A gentleman who has served on 
the Illinois State Board of Pardons for more 
than twenty years told me that the forgiving 
101 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

and self -forgetful devotion of women to impris- 
oned fathers, husbands, sons, or brothers was to 
him a constant marvel. He told of a poor old 
mother who had been neglected and cruelly 
beaten by a drunken and criminal son, who at 
last fetched up in the penitentiary. Neverthe- 
less the old mother, apparently forgetful of all 
this brutality, continued to make the most pitiful 
intercession for his parole. She lived to make 
intercession for him. 

The vicarious principle in human life, how- 
ever, is not confined to the domestic relations. 
Have not soldiers always died for their tribe 
or their country, losing self for the welfare of 
the social organism? The story of Regulus, of 
the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylee, of 
Arnold von Winkelried, of Nathan Hale, and 
thousands of others, attest the existence of the 
vicarious principle in the history of patriotism. 

Sacrifice equally heroic shines resplendent in 
many a tale of scientific and professional de- 
votion. Dr. Thompson remained alone all night 
on the battlefield of Alma trying to alleviate the 
sufferings not only of his countrymen, but of 
102 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

their foes. Dr. Hay displayed the same heroism 
at Benares when the terrible Sepoys were ad- 
vancing to the massacre of every foreigner. He 
did not desert the patients in the hospital, even 
though he knew to stay was to die. Time would 
fail me to tell of martyrs to truth, of heroes 
and heroines who have suffered and died for 
others, actuated by principles of patriotism, 
duty, and religion. These loving deeds of self- 
sacrifice are daily performed with no thought 
of notoriety or personal glory. All ages and 
nations have been adorned with these "Golden 
Deeds" done in obedience to the vicarious prin- 
ciple. 

Vicariousness is a cosmic principle — the very 
word of God, writ large on the face of the whole 
earth, graven deep into the whole creation. But, 
like the law of required fitness, this law of love 
is not fulfilled until "the Word became flesh 
and dwelt among us" in the Divine Man, Christ 
Jesus, who was the very incarnation of these 
two principles. In His life He "went about do- 
ing good" with never a thought of escaping pain 
Himself, but ever with the purpose of relieving 
103 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

the physical and spiritual pain of others. Other 
folks and their needs filled His thoughts. For 
others He lived and died. From first to last 
He lost His life in the lives of others. He identi- 
fied Himself with the race, putting Himself at- 
one with us. Christ in His very nature is at- 
one-ment: in His holiness at one with G-od, in 
His love at one with us, identifying Himself on 
one hand with the Father in the matter of char- 
acter, and with us on the other in the matter of 
need. His saying, ' ' Inasmuch as ye did it unto 
these My brethren, even these least, ye did it 
unto Me," shows how completely He identified 
Himself with us. He is accordingly the Son of 
God and Son of man, for He is identified both 
with God and man. Those who live selfish lives, 
neglecting to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, 
visit the suffering, put themselves out of har- 
mony with Christ and with the universal law of 
vicarious sacrifice. They are the unreconciled, 
the unforgiven. Christ died for these selfish folk, 
but they refuse to make any sacrifice for Him 
and His brethren. They refuse the cross. Thus 
they become outsiders in the universe and are 
104 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

cast into outer darkness like wandering meteors 
that have lost their orbit. They are the real 
anti-Christs, opposing themselves to the cosmic 
law of love; and their destiny is that of the 
unfit. 

The cross is where the vicarious principle 
comes to its climax. It is the fulfillment of the 
cosmic law. The death of the Incarnate Word 
on the cross is the supreme manifestation of the 
struggle for the life of others, the love-principle 
at high tide. It is God putting His seal on the 
universal law — sealing it in His own blood. At 
Calvary we see the enlargement — the completion 
— of the vicarious spirit that has been traced 
from inanimate matter up to man. We have 
seen its scope widening as we came up to the 
cros's. There we see the horizon enlarge to in- 
finity so as to comprehend every sinner. In 
the sub-human world we have seen it operating 
temporarily, and mostly in connection with the 
function of reproduction. In the human world 
it enlarges in duration and scope, so as to 
include relations outside those involved in re- 
production. In the cross of Christ self-sacrifice 
105 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

reaches a depth of suffering beyond our natural 
experiences, and leaps beyond the limit of family, 
friends, and nation, until it embraces a rebellious 
and unholy race. "For the good man some 
would even dare to die. But God commendeth 
His own love toward us, in that, while we were 
yet sinners, Christ died for us. ' ' 

The sign of the cross is on every molecule, 
on every living cell, on every organism, on every 
soul; but it is more or less blurred and indis- 
tinct. On Calvary the cross-principle glows 
with supernatural light, with the very glory of 
God. There we begin to "apprehend what is 
the breadth and length and height, and to know 
the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. ' ' 

God, by the cross of Christ, shows that He, 
too, is in harmony with the principle of suffer- 
ing for others. Obviously, therefore, the only 
way in which we can become reconciled to God 
is to take up the cross of self-denying service 
and follow Jesus. The moment one makes choice 
of such a life and abandons selfishness as the 
ruling motive of life, he is born anew, becomes 
''partaker of the divine nature," is reconciled 
106 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

to the universal law, and is at peace with God. 
That moment is divine grace made effectual in 
him and for him; or, to use the condensed and 
symbolic language of Scripture, "the blood of 
Jesus Christ cleanses him from all sin. ' ' 

The inference should not be drawn from the 
above paragraph that atonement is simply fol- 
lowing Christ in self -sacrifice — that it is an affair 
of mere imitation. The atonement for our sins 
is vastly more vital and fundamental than merely 
following Christ. Atonement is rooted in the 
grace of God; and the grace of God is no mere 
shimmering beauty on the surface of things: it 
is the very heart of Deity that went to the last 
conceivable limit to express itself in the suffer- 
ing and death of Christ. It is a matter of blood 
and anguish. This is Deity 's part in the making 
of peace. But we mean to say that all that God 
has done for us in the death of Christ is of no 
avail unless we apply to ourselves as a principle 
of moral conduct the divine principle of loyalty 
and love involved in the death of the Savior. 
"We do not imply that atonement is effected by 
simply following Christ, but that no atonement 
107 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

is effective without following Him. The death 
of Christ is the seal of a New Covenant, and 
a covenant implies obligations on both sides. 
God has done His moral duty to His ignorant 
and sinful creatures by revealing His righteous- 
ness and grace at terrible cost to Himself. But 
it is all in vain to the human being who re- 
fuses to be loyal to truth and helpful to his 
fellows. This is so plain as to need no argu- 
ment. Christ's words are not of doubtful im- 
port: "Whosoever doth not bear his own cross, 
and come after Me, can not be My disciple. ' ' 

The cross is, then, the climax of the universal 
plan. Here God is revealed as the Sufferer. 
Here He is wounded for our transgressions, 
bruised for our iniquities, and suffers the chas- 
tisement of our peace. "In all their afflictions 
He was afflicted. " Were it otherwise, God would 
be outside of our life and experience. He would 
be an outsider to whom we could never be recon- 
ciled; for we could not love a God who would 
entail vicarious suffering upon His world, and 
make Himself a blissful exception to the rule. 
108 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

Christ 's symbolic name is Immanuel — ' ' God with 
us : ' ' and He is a High Priest that can be touched 
with the feeling of our infirmities. To be our 
Strength, our Help, our Comforter, our Re- 
deemer, God must suffer with us, and for us, and 
we must know that He does. That He does gra- 
ciously suffer the death of Christ assures us. 

Here, we remark incidentally, is the funda- 
mental falsity of ' ' Christian Science. ' ' It denies 
all this. It is a bloodless, painless philosophy, 
with no vicariousness, no discipline, no cross. Its 
major premise is a lie; for it assumes that God 
can not suffer. Consequently its conclusions are 
in the main false. Eddy ism denies the cross of 
Christ, which is the essence of Christianity. 

Christianity is not merely a world-religion: 
it is a cosmic religion. Its roots are in the very 
nature of things. The principle of the cross is 
a cosmic principle equally with the law of gravi- 
tation or the laws of heredity. This fact was 
clearly indicated by Christ when the Greeks 
came to Philip saying, "Sir, we would see 
Jesus." On first thought the Savior's reply to 
109 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

that request seems quite irrelevant : ' ' The hour 
is come that the Son of man should be glorified. 
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain 
of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth 
by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much 
fruit. He that loveth his life loseth it; and he 
that hateth his life in this world shall keep it 
unto life eternal." What mean these queer 
words? Why, this: If you would see Jesus, 
look into the heart of a grain of wheat, dying — 
losing itself — that the life of another might be 
nourished, hating its individual life, that it may 
be passed on multiplied. In other words, the 
sign of the cross is on the little heart of a grain 
of wheat; the cross is a fact of the cosmos seen 
not only in the crucifixion, but in all life. The 
parable of the unfruitful tree emphasizes the 
same truth. These teachings emphasize that 
Christ is in His world. His name is Immanuel — 
"God with us." "Without Him was not any- 
thing made that hath been made." The cross 
was in the beginning with God, and has all along 
been in the world which He hath made. The 
110 



THE COSMIC ROOT OF LOVE 

cross is the manifestation of an eternal prin- 
ciple; Jesus is "the Lamb that hath been slain 
from the foundation of the world. ' '* The seer of 
Patmos beheld the apocalypse of this principle 
of the altruistic personality loyal to itself where 
he sees, "in the midst of the throne and of the 
four living creatures, and in the midst of the 
elders, a Lamb standing, as though it had been 
slain." (Rev. 5:6.) What does this vision set 
forth, if not that the principle of the blood is 
at the very center of things — enthroned in the 
heart of Deity, symbolized by the throne ; in the 
creation, symbolized by the four creatures; and 
in the Church, represented by the elders? To 
this principle on the throne of the universe 
every knee bows of things in heaven, and on the 
earth, and under the earth, and "every created 
thing ' ' chants anthems of worship ; for this self - 



* (It is not easy to see why the American Revisers made 
the phrase, "from the foundation of the world," modify 
"written." instead of "slain." The translation of the King 
James, British Revised, Luther's German, Latin Vulgate, 
Douay, and others, is in the American Standard relegated to 
the margin. The order of words in the Greek would cer- 
tainly suggest that the phrase belongs to "slain.") 

Ill 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

respecting, self-denying love is alone worthy and 
able to open the seals of the Book of Life, and 
to reveal the meaning of things human and 
divine. In the light of this truth we see light; 
for it is the key to the interpretation of life and 
religion. 



112 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Principle of the Cross 

'Behold then the goodness and severity of God. 
Romans 11 : 22. 



Chapter VIII 
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CROSS 

THE principle of the cross has been ex- 
pounded in the two preceding chapters; 
but it is well to bring the two lines of 
exposition together by further discussion. Per- 
haps it is already plain that the law of self- 
preservation and the law of self-sacrifice come 
into perfect harmony at the cross of Christ; 
that egoism and altruism, in their higher forms, 
co-exist and co-operate, and are not mutually 
exclusive. Law and love meet at the cross and 
are reconciled; for there the inexorable char- 
acter of God is shown to be love. "All 's love, 
yet all 's law." At the cross we see the divine 
egoism manifested as inflexible righteousness. 
There we behold God being true to Himself at 
cost of intense anguish. The cross, in Scripture 
language, was "for the showing of His right- 
eousness at this present season: that He might 
Himself be righteous and the maker righteous 
115 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

of him that hath faith in Jesus." (Rom. 3 : 26.) 
The English version translates the word dikaion 
as "just," with "righteous" in the margin as 
an alternative. It is somewhat difficult to see 
why the revisers did not adhere to their rule of 
translating the same Greek word by the same 
English word, for the Greek word translated 
sometimes "righteous" and sometimes "just" 
is the same throughout the third chapter of Ro- 
mans. There is a distinction between "just" 
and "righteous," the latter being the broader 
term including the other. It would have been 
less confusing if "righteous" had been put in 
the body of the text, although that would have 
involved the difficulty of finding a corresponding 
English word to use instead of "Justifier," 
which immediately follows; for "maker right- 
eous" is neither elegant nor idiomatic. 

It is worth repeating that the cross of Cal- 
vary is revelation of God's self-respect, and is 
the price paid for His self-preservation. It is 
the manifestation of egoism in its truest and 
best sense. It was a case of choice of environ- 
ment. Christ might have yielded to the seductive 
116 



THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CROSS 

voice of the prince of this world and saved His 
physical life: He might have chosen to adapt 
Himself to this world ; but He responded to the 
demands of another world, and chose the spir- 
itual environment. He denied His lower nature 
in the struggle to maintain His character and 
save His soul. He could not have saved us if 
He had not. Without obedience to the law of 
His own moral being His love for us would have 
been empty, valueless, and ineffective; for it is 
holiness that gives meaning, value, and power 
to love. 

Any theory of the atonement that makes the 
death of Christ an occasion for any change in 
the attitude of the Father toward His law or 
toward us seems to me false. The Savior's 
death was not to allay divine resentment against 
sin or sinners, not to appease God's anger, not 
to satisfy vindictive justice, not to make any 
change in the divine mind. It did none of these 
things. It did not "satisfy" the demands of 
the law in the sense that we are excused from 
obedience to that law, or that, as a penalty, it 
paid off any of our bad accounts. We do not 
117 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

' ' make the law of none effect through faith. God 
forbid: nay, we establish the law." (Rom. 
3:31.) The cross revealed the relentless re- 
sentment of God against sin, and the unchange- 
able purpose, the unalterable character of God. 
It is a revelation of the continuity of divine law 
and of our obligation to keep it. It revealed 
that God is just and righteous. It is, first of 
all, a revelation of the divine egoism. 

Divine altruism, as well as divine egoism, is 
manifested through the cross. There the love 
of self and the love of others combine into one 
harmonious principle. There self -loyalty and 
service are seen to be one and inseparable. To 
attempt to separate these elements of true char- 
acter is morally disastrous; for to be righteous 
without love is to be a Pharisee or a tyrant; to 
love without righteousness is to be a sentimen- 
talist or a libertine. In the cross of Christ right- 
eousness and love, egoism and altruism, self- 
preservation and self-sacrifice are seen to be in 
perfect harmony. 

Both love and law, therefore, are at the cross. 
It is love of holiness and love of us that shines 
.118 



THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CROSS 

from Calvary. "Christ died for us." It was 
grace and truth that brought Him to the manger 
and to the cross. The cross was the price of His 
spiritual self-preservation: it was also the cost 
of loving us; for our sin and helplessness im- 
posed the price. 

"All 's love, yet all 's law," said Browning; 
and with this agree the words of Paul, who said 
in fine phrase : 

"He that loveth his neighbor hath fulfilled 
the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adul- 
tery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, 
Thou shalt not covet, and if there be any other 
commandment, it is summed up in this word, 
namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- 
self. Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: 
love therefore is the fulfillment of the 

LAW." 



119 



CHAPTER IX 

Forgiveness Through the Cross 

"Justified freely by His grace through the 
redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God 
set forth to be a propitiation, through faith in 
His blood."— Rom. 3:24, 25. 



Chapter IX 
FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

BUT some one will say, What connection 
has the death of Christ with the forgive- 
ness of sinners? Was the historic death 
of Jesus not necessary to make the remission of 
sin possible ? 

The answer to that is: The mere shedding 
of the Savior's blood and His physical death 
did not make it any easier for the Father to 
forgive sin afterward than before. The death 
of Jesus did not increase God's tenderness and 
mercy toward the repentant sinner. Centuries 
before the crucifixion the psalmists had written, 
' ' Like as a father pitieth his children, so Jehovah 
pitieth them that fear Him," and "For Thou, 
Lord, art good, and ready to forgive, and abun- 
dant in lovingkindness unto all them that call 
upon Thee;" and Isaiah had written, "Let the 
wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man 
his thoughts; and let him return unto Jehovah, 
123 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

and He will have mercy upon him; and to our 
God, for He will abundantly pardon." The 
sight of His bleeding Son did not make God 
hate sin any less, nor love penitents any more. 
God loved the world before He sent His only 
begotten Son. The physical death of Jesus was 
not demanded as a prerequisite of justification. 
The blood of Christ may be the sine qua non of 
a perfect revelation and of a perfect repentance, 
but not of a perfect forgiveness. It is not the 
material blood of Jesus that cleanses us from 
all sin — not the blood composed of serum and 
corpuscles that sprinkled the hill of Calvary, 
which "redeemed us" and "washed us," and by 
which we shall overcome. But this material 
blood is tremendously significant, symbolical, 
and sacramental of the spiritual fact lying back 
of it, namely, the GRACE OF GOD, who loved 
us and gave Himself for us; the grace that suf- 
fers to save; the grace that freely forgives and 
"passes over the sins done aforetime, in the for- 
bearance of God," when the sinner repents and 
turns from sin. The blood of Christ is evidence 
and sacramental symbol of the love of God for 
124 



FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

a lost world — a love which gave up life to save. 
Blood in the Bible is always symbol of life. The 
blood of Jesus, therefore, is the sacramental sym- 
bol of divine life laid down for the love of men. 
Divine grace that empties itself, takes the form 
of a servant, and becomes obedient even unto 
the death of the cross, is the ground of forgive- 
ness; and the blood of Jesus is the ground of 
our assurance of forgiveness. We are "justified 
freely by His grace through the redemption that 
is in Christ Jesus . . . through faith in His 
blood." Faith in Christ means the practical 
assurance that He is the truth about God. It is 
"assurance of things hoped for, a conviction [or 
test] of things not seen." I have good reason 
to believe that my sins are forgiven when in 
faith I receive the blood of Jesus as the evidence 
of God's grace to the penitent. "Hereby know 
we love, because He laid down His life for us." 
The blood is, therefore, the ground of a Chris- 
tian's faith, but not in itself, apart from the 
grace behind it, the ground of forgiveness. We 
are saved by grace through faith. 

In England, it is said, over the burial place 
125 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

of a Crusader lie side by side in effigy, their 
arms crossed over their breasts in everlasting 
stillness, the forms of a knight and his fair lady. 
Clad in armor, and complete from head to foot, 
rests the figure of the stalwart knight. The 
figure of the lady, however, while in all else 
perfect and entire, is marred by a missing 
hand. 

The curious traveler is told the following 
story in explanation of the handless arm. Dur- 
ing the Crusades the knight was captured by 
Saladin, the Moslem leader. When asked to give 
a reason why he should not be put to death, the 
knight replied that he had, back in old England, 
a lady loyal, who loved him with supreme devo- 
tion, and that if he were killed her heart would 
break. Saladin, who had naught but doubt for 
woman's love and loyalty, in scorn of his cap- 
tive's confidence, laughed a mocking laugh and 
said, "She will soon forget her grief, and will 
soon be married to another." "Not so," said 
the knight; "she would give her right hand for 
me." "Ah! we shall see," said Saladin. "I 
promise thy life if thy lady send to me her 
126 



FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

beautiful white hand. ' ' This grim message was 
sent to the lady, whereupon she had her right 
hand cut off and sent to Saladin. "Ah!" said 
he, in surprise, "now I know thou hast told me 
the truth. Now I know the heart of one true 
and loyal woman. Thou shalt not die. Thou 
art free." 

So does the nail-pierced hand of Jesus re- 
move the doubt of God's forgiving grace and 
become the ground of our assurance of forgive- 
ness — the basis of our faith; but back of the 
bloody hand is the heart of love, which is the 
ground and source of forgiveness itself. The 
sacrifice of the hand made no change in the 
love and loyalty of the devoted lady; but it 
made a tremendous difference at the other end 
of the transaction. After such a sacrifice neither 
Saladin nor the knight could ever question the 
love that prompted it. No more can we, unless 
we be hopelessly skeptical, doubt the grace of 
God, who commended His love toward us in the 
appalling death of His Son in order that we 
might know God, and knowing Him, be saved 
from doubt and sin, and so find peace. No more 
127 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

can we doubt the exceeding sinfulness of sin 
that imposed the sacrifice. 

But some one will say, Can a just God simply- 
pass over our sins, and forgive them upon our 
repentance alone, without some "satisfaction" 
or "propitiation," and treat our past sins as 
though they had not been? 

Well, our past sins are not as though they 
had not been, even after forgiveness. Certain 
organic and social consequences follow even for- 
given trespasses against God's law. The reck- 
less libertine, the drunkard, or the embezzler 
is not saved at one stroke from all the organic 
and social consequences of past misdeeds. The 
same is true of all sins, more or less, according 
to the nature and circumstances of the sin. Con- 
sequences of sin are not necessarily obliterated 
when we are converted and forgiven. The effects 
of our old sins sometimes go on to curse other 
people long after we ourselves have made our 
peace with God; and this is part of the ines- 
capable penalty of sin in spite of forgiveness. 
If Christ's sufferings are to be considered as 
the sufficient substituted penalty for our sins, 
12S 



FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

then why are the penalties not all remitted! 
Either His sufferings were not sufficient, or else 
they were not penalties at all. 

In reality, forgiveness does not include the 
removal of organic and social consequences at 
all. Forgiveness is the re-establishment of 
friendly personal relations after those relations 
have been broken by sin. Sin is forgiven, but 
none of the consequences, except those that hinge 
on past unfriendly relations between man and 
God. The suffering caused by the consciousness 
of being wrong, inferior, and helpless, the fear 
of coming judgment, the disquietude of a dual 
personal life, the sense of personal isolation that 
sin brings, are all removed. All spiritual penal- 
ties that result from personal alienation between 
a soul and its God are necessarily remitted. The 
sentence of spiritual death which hangs over 
every unrepentant soul is suspended. But there 
are certain organic and social penalties that are 
not included in the pardon. After his adultery 
with Bathsheba and his virtual murder of Uriah, 
David suffered the deepest moral anguish. He 
received the assurance of divine forgiveness. 
9 129 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

His soul was restored, his spiritual peace re- 
turned. But the memory of his crime never left 
him; the child born of this illicit act died; do- 
mestic and political troubles growing out of his 
sin continued for years, and perhaps for genera- 
tions; Uriah was not brought back to life, nor 
Bathsheba's womanly virtue restored. The 
Prodigal Son was restored to his father's favor, 
but the evidence of his sinful life remained in 
weakened body and dissipated resources. 

In spite of this, however, the change in the 
human spirit that accompanies the assurance of 
forgiveness, namely, regeneration, has in many 
cases so profound and mysterious an influence 
on the body as to remove certain pathological 
conditions. A friend of mine was completely 
cured, some years after his conversion, at the 
moment of a more complete consecration, of an 
intense craving for tobacco. The story of "Old 
Born Drunk," in Begbie's "Twice-Born Men," 
and of "The Regenerate," by Norman Duncan, 
in The Century of January, 1911, are notable 
instances — many times duplicated— of the eradi- 
cation of a most deeply-seated alcoholism. 
130 



FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

Nevertheless, the results of regeneration must 
never be confused with those of forgiveness, even 
though they might occur in the same moment of 
time. 

Forgiveness, however, is no small thing; for 
suddenly to be conscious that the Father is recon- 
ciled to us and we to Him, that His personal 
displeasure against our conduct is a thing of 
the past, bring ineffable peace and joy and 
restoration of soul. 

God can justly forgive the repentant sinner 
because, in a sense, sincere repentance renders 
one no longer a sinner. The thief on the cross 
was no longer a thief when in faith and peni- 
tence he turned to Christ's mercy. That mo- 
ment he repudiated his old self and was a new 
man. I can justly forgive my child who has 
told me a lie the moment she comes to me in 
tears, puts her little arms around my neck, and 
sobs out her sorrow for her sin. She has re- 
pudiated the lie, and is no longer a liar. I shall 
not ask her to do further penance, nor shall I 
ask any one to do penance for her, nor to make 
any further satisfaction or propitiation to me. 
131 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

To do so would be unjust and ungracious. 
For her falsehood she has suffered and I have 
suffered. I have suffered because of my love 
for truthfulness and because of my love for her. 
I am propitiated, if the word be insisted on, the 
moment she repudiates her sin and turns to me 
for pardon. My suffering love is atonement for 
her, my grace is sufficient for her. 

In the Art Building at the World's Fair at 
St. Louis was a fine little picture entitled, 
"Vergib uns unsere Schulden." Standing in 
the street door was a young woman, the daughter 
of the family, who was evidently returning from 
a life of shame, now repentant and longing for 
forgiveness. At a table in the center of the 
room were three persons — the mother, father, 
and only brother of the girl. The mother was 
standing behind the table, wiping her tears with 
the corner of her apron, yearning to clasp the 
repentant daughter in an embrace of forgive- 
ness, but evidently not daring to do so ; for both 
the father and the son sat sullenly, taking little 
notice of the girl. The father would not so much 
as look at her. The brother looked at her out 
132 



FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

of the corner of his eye, with a sneer upon his 
countenance. There was no forgiveness in their 
hearts for the sinner, and the poor girl hesitated 
in fear upon the threshold. 

It was a fine picture of a wrathful father 
demanding propitiation, and would have been 
a fitting frontispiece for some treatises on the 
atonement, for it represented the idea so stoutly 
insisted on by some writers, that the main object 
of the atonement was not "man's subjective 
moral improvement," but the satisfaction of the 
justice of God — "to remove from the divine 
mind an obstacle to the showing of favor to the 
guilt}'."* There was nothing about the father 
or the son to remind one of the God whom Jesus 
Christ manifested. The only godlike person in 
the scene was the mother, who stood ready to 
forgive and to clasp the sin-sick girl in her 
motherly arms. 

There is no obstacle in the divine mind to 
showing favor to the guilty, if the guilty truly 
and earnestly repent of their sins, if, indeed, the 
story of the prodigal son means anything. That 

* A. H. Strong — Systematic Theology. 

133 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

there was no obstacle in the father's mind is 
the pith of the story. The elder brother quite 
agreed with some modern theologians and with 
the Pharisees of that time, that there ought to 
have been an obstacle. But the elder brother 
does not seem to be very popular with Christ. 

If that little picture in the art gallery could 
have been changed so as to show the aged father 
weeping over his daughter's sin, and praying 
and yearning with broken heart for her return 
from a life of shame, and sending his son, the 
pride and glory of his home, to seek the wanton 
girl to tell her of the welcome that awaits her 
at home when she shall turn from sin, — that 
would have been something like the God of the 
gospel. 

Suppose, however, the daughter doubts her 
father's gracious spirit. ''How shall I know 
that he will receive me?" "Believe in me," 
replies the son. "Would I have crossed those 
fearful mountains, and met with storm and 
beasts and robbers, and braved the sneers of 
thy companions, if I knew not my father's 
heart? Thou seest my bleeding feet, my thorn- 
134 



FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

pierced hands. thou of little faith! where- 
fore shouldst thou doubt ? Behold me, and thou 
hast seen the father. Believe in me." "But 
what propitiation shall I bring, what expiation 
make?" "Ah! thou hast nothing thou canst 
bring, except thyself repentant. I have re- 
deemed thee. His grace is sufficient for thee. 
Behold my hands and my feet: are they not 
propitiation for thy sins? Father so loves thee 
that he sent me, his only son, that if thou 
shouldst believe in me, thou shouldst not 
perish here, but shouldst cease from sin and 
turn again home. Thy father's suffering 
righteousness and love atone for thee, and 
I am the scarred and bleeding witness that he 
is propitious — not to thy sins, but to thee, when 
thou shalt leave thy life of shame and be recon- 
ciled to him. Thou canst not live at home and 
live in sin; for he is righteous, and hates thy 
sin ; but he is gracious and propitious whenever 
thou shalt forsake thy way and come back to 
virtue and our love." 

"Whereupon some of the vile companions who 
consorted with the girl, hearing this conversa- 
135 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

tion, took counsel how they might destroy him 
and keep the girl in bondage ; for she was profit- 
able unto them. "Let us seduce him; for if 
we can lead him into partnership with our sins, 
his mouth is closed, and he will not dare to re- 
turn to his father, and, besides, we have gained 
a new recruit. ' ' 

But all their seductive arts were vain, every 
assault on his virtue was repelled. He remained 
loyal to his father, to himself, to his sister, to 
his mission. Had he yielded, there were no one 
left to speak for the father and to plead with 
the sister. Upon him rested the responsibility 
of declaring the father's righteousness and 
mercy. He must remain holy, or have his mes- 
sage of the father 's holiness and love discredited. 
It was wantonness and doubt he came to destroy ; 
but how could he destroy the works of the devil 
if he should yield to the devil ? He must, there- 
fore, maintain his virtue, and make it plain 
that there could be no reconciliation except on 
the father's terms of future purity. He must 
propitiate the father by dying, if need be, in 
order to uphold the father's demand for right- 
eousness. 136 



FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

After their bland arts had failed, these evil 
men and women tried sterner measures. They 
did not wish to lose their victim. Besides, this 
young man's fidelity and chastity rebuked their 
wickedness. They must away with him. So 
they set upon him and beat him and left him 
for dead. This was their defeat; for not only 
had they failed to conquer his righteous and lov- 
ing spirit with seductions and violence, but the 
sister, seeing this fidelity to the father and to 
her, began to hate her sin as she had never hated 
it — the sin that could impose a ransom such as 
this. Could she longer doubt the father's right- 
eousness and love? Would this heroic brother 
brave such moral and physical dangers if he 
did not know the father's heart? In her 
brother's blood she sees the ugliness of her own 
sin, and the beauty of holiness and grace. It 
is enough. She renounces her sin and her com- 
panions, and returns home. Sin and hell have 
met a double defeat. The blood is the token of 
the covenant, and her faith appropriates the 
father's grace of which it speaks. It first 
awakens in the sinner deep sorrow and horror 
137 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

for her sin, and then a sense of cleansing and 
peace. 

"My God is reconciled; 

His pardoning voice I hear ; 
He owns me for His child, 

I can no longer fear: 
With confidence I now draw nigh, 
And, 'Father, Abba, Father,' cry." 

This parable falls short of the truth in that 
the father and son are not ' ' one ' ' in the identical 
mode in which the Divine Father and Son are 
one; but in the light of this human analogy, 
are not the classic words of Eomans 3 : 24-26 
natural and intelligible? Why burden them 
with metaphysics and mechanical ethics? Why 
manufacture moral difficulties in the Godhead 
merely to fit the supposed exigencies of the 
text ? ' ' All have sinned : " no comment is neces- 
sary on this literal truth. That fact is the cause 
of all the trouble. "Being justified freely by 
His grace:" that is quite literal and simple. 
"Through the redemption that is in Christ 
Jesus:" Jesus paid the price of our moral 
138 



FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

reclamation in His incarnation, suffering, and 
death. No haggling about the meaning of "re- 
demption" is necessary. It is simply the price 
paid to win us from our moral wildness, as the 
farmer toils and suffers to redeem his farm from 
miasmal swamps, tangled vines, and cockle- 
burs, that it may bring forth useful harvests. 
"Whom God set forth to be a propitiation," — 
as the father in the foregoing parable set forth 
his son as the pledge of his propitiousness and 
in lieu of all other propitiation, and as the 
son, in being loyal to his father's character, 
propitiated the demands of that character. 
"Through faith in His blood:" the blood of the 
Son is the evidence of divine propitiousness, and 
faith is belief in and personal appropriation 
of the evidence. "To show His righteousness:" 
Christ's fidelity to the moral law showed that. 
Without that firm adherence to righteousness, 
the "passing over of sins done aforetime, in 
the forbearance of God" would have appeared 
to be immoral. Forgiveness of the unrighteous 
past with no reference to a righteous future on 
the part of the forgiven would not be a just 
139 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

or moral act. "For the showing of His right- 
eousness at this present season: that he might 
be just and the justifier of him that hath faith 
in Jesus:" the justice of justification is evident 
when the act of justification involves no devia- 
tion on the part of God from His own moral 
demands. In other words, justification is just 
when regeneration and sanctification are the end. 
Objection may be raised to the adequacy of 
the human illustrations of fatherly forgiveness 
used above to represent the facts of divine for- 
giveness. Inadequate they are — but in degree, 
not in quality or kind. Is not God a Father? 
Is not this the message of the life and death of 
Christ? Is this not the meaning of the cross? 
The Divine Father, in the person of the Eternal 
Son, has suffered intensely to make Himself 
manifest to us, to reveal the nature of sin, and 
to bring us to deep repentance and to newness 
of life. He offered Himself in blood for our 
sins. His holy and loving nature demanded that 
He sacrifice Himself in the incarnation and the 
crucifixion for the manifestation and mainte- 
nance of His righteousness, and as the expression 
140 



FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

and consequence of His love. In His human 
nature He died in the conflict with sin in order 
that He might propitiate or satisfy His divine 
character of holy love. What more can any 
theory of the atonement demand? Is not the 
vision of the righteous and loving Father whose 
name Jesus manifested (John 17:6 and 26) 
enough to satisfy the mind and heart of men 
and women? And is not the blood of Christ 
the certain evidence that the Father is righteous, 
and at the same time propitious toward the re- 
pentant sinner — both "just and the justifier?" 
The principle of the cross, which is in the 
heart of Deity and in the creation from the be- 
ginning, is the eternal propitiation for the sins 
of the whole world. The suffering holy love of 
God is atonement. The free grace of God is the 
ground of forgiveness. Atonement becomes ef- 
fectually operative, however, only when the sin- 
ner appropriates it by repentance and by taking 
up the cross as the motive-principle of his life. 
Reconciliation (or forgiveness) becomes actual 
only when the soul surrenders by an act of 
loving trust to the righteousness and grace of 
141 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

God. One can not be a disciple without taking 
up the cross. We sing — 

"Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee, 
E'en though it be a cross that raiseth me,"— 

as if the cross were the exceptional method of 
drawing us nearer to God — the method of last 
resort. The fact is, there is no other way ex- 
cept the way of the cross. ' ' Whosoever doth not 
bear his own cross, and come after Me, can not 
be My disciple" means that if any one will not 
renounce his selfish individualism and accept the 
life of loyalty to the character of God and of 
self-denying service of men, he can not be a 
Christian; he can not be reconciled to God, nor 
God to him; he has no benefit of the atonement 
of grace, and no pardon. Sinners are justified 
of past offenses by the principles of the cross 
personally appropriated, and there is no other 
way. 

Taking up the cross as the motive-principle 

of life is the new birth, and is reconciliation. 

"I am crucified with Christ" is Paul's way of 

saying that the cross of Christ has become the 

142 






FORGIVENESS THROUGH THE CROSS 

living principle of his own life, the energy be- 
hind all his activity, the source of his justifica- 
tion and peace, and the basis of his fellowship 
with Christ. In taking up the cross and follow- 
ing Jesus in personal surrender to Him we are 
at one with God; by walking in the light as He 
is in the light we have fellowship with one 
another, and the blood of Jesus cleanse th us 
from all sin. 



143 



CHAPTER X 

The Power of the Cross 

"The word of the cross is to them that perish 
foolishness; but unto us ivho are saved it is the 
power of God." — .1 Cor. 1:18. 



Chapter X 
THE POWER OF THE CROSS 

THE historic death of Christ was necessary 
for two reasons: (1) To make complete 
revelation of the character of God as holy 
love; (2) To reproduce that character in hu- 
manity. 

It is clear that, if men are to be reconciled 
and saved, the character of God must be estab- 
lished beyond question. We must know what 
God is. In the words and life of Jesus we may 
see plainly the righteousness and the love of 
God, and God's design for human character. 
In the death of Jesus we see His absolute loyalty 
to that character. There is no other conceivable 
way by which God's absolute loyalty to right- 
eousness could be fully made known, except to 
meet, as a man, the temptations of human life, 
and to resist them "even unto blood." Any- 
thing short of a most excruciating death could 
147 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

not have revealed how invulnerable that loyalty 
was. 

Neither is there any other conceivable way 
by which God could effectually reproduce His 
character of holy love in us except by dying for 
us. God's grand purpose is to win our love. 
The very substance of salvation is to love God 
with all our might, and our fellow-men as our- 
selves. How is this spiritual condition to be 
produced? By love. There is no other way. 
Like begets like. Only love begets love. God 
is powerful; and He rules the physical universe 
by power ; but He can not rule by physical force 
in the moral sphere. In the very nature of the 
case He can not save a soul by overriding the 
soul by force. Nobody is ever conquered by 
force. A person can be imprisoned, or beaten, 
or killed, without being conquered. They killed 
Christ, but they did not conquer Him. You can 
kill a criminal without saving his soul. You 
can whip a child until he obeys you; but you 
have not conquered him until you secure his 
obedience by his love for the right and for you. 
Corporal punishment administered by the State, 
148 



THE POWER OF THE CROSS 

by a teacher, or by a parent is not efficacious if 
given in hate, anger, or revenge. Love may 
sometimes use severe methods ; but it is only love 
that can safely and profitably chastise. The 
Lord's punishments are all given in love. 
"Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth." 

Neither can a soul be frightened into salva- 
tion; for a human spirit is not saved until it 
is made to love; and fear in itself does not 
create love. We may sometimes be scared out 
of certain sins, for prudential considerations; 
but we can not be scared into loving obedience. 
A good scare is sometimes helpful in bringing 
one to his moral senses, but salvation can not 
end in a scare. 

God's chief appeal is not to the reason. It 
is hard to reason anybody out of his sins and 
into love. Reason has large place in religion; 
but no one's religion amounts to much if it be- 
gins and ends in the intellect. Reason can not 
produce love. Reason produces a creed. 

Hezekiah expressed the whole philosophy of 
salvation when he sang, "Thou hast loved my 
soul from the pit of corruption." (Isa. 38: 17.) 
149 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

Wicked old John Newton, after he had become 
a saint, sang: 

"In evil long I took delight, 
Unawed by shame or fear, 
Till a new object struck my sight, 
And stopped my wild career. 

"I saw One hanging on a tree 

In agonies and blood, 
"Who fixed His languid eyes on me 
As near the cross I stood." 

It was the vision of the crucified Savior that 
regenerated my own soul and won me to Him. 
I love because He first loved me. Nobody is 
ever conquered until he is conquered by love. 
That is why God's sun and rain are given alike 
to the good and to the evil. If it never rained 
on a bad man's field, he might be driven to 
keep the letter of the law through compulsion 
of force and fear ; but it would not win his love, 
and he is not won until he is won to love. 

Christ will win us by what He is in Himself 
or He will not win at all. He proposes to win 
by the surpassing excellence of His character 
150 



THE POWER OF THE CROSS 

and His deep love for us. If the length and 
breadth and height of Christ's love for our souls 
can not draw us out of the pit of corruption, we 
are there to stay. Can one imagine what else 
more efficacious God could do to win our love 
than He has done? Can one suggest something 
more winsome than the character and the cross 
of Christ? 

The cross is both light and power. It is 
revelation ; but it is much more : it is ' ' the power 
of God unto salvation." If there is no recon- 
ciliation between God and man apart from a 
transformation of the character of man into the 
likeness of God, it is evident that God must 
furnish the spiritual energy by which that trans- 
formation can be effected. There must be a 
powerful incentive to repentance, and a "power 
not ourselves" to quicken and strengthen our 
latent spiritual resources. It is not enough that 
God make a seed endowed with latent life; He 
must also give the sun, rain, and soil to quicken 
and develop the life of the seed. Likewise it 
is not enough that God endow us with a spir- 
itual nature; He must shine upon us by the 
151 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

glory of His own character, that we who are 
dead in trespasses and sins may be quickened 
into repentance and newness of life. At the 
cross the clouds roll back; His glory is visible, 
His character unveiled; and the cross becomes 
"the power of God unto salvation," — a recon- 
ciling medium, a transforming power. 

In previous chapters it has been urged that 
the cross is a principle found in the normal 
human heart, the light that lighteth every man 
coming into the world. Although, in our un- 
enlightened, unquickened state this principle is 
obscured and narrowed in scope, yet it is the 
very Spirit of the living God in us, the broken 
light of God's glory. That natural principle 
constitutes the basis of the supernatural appeal. 
There is power, therefore, in the historic cruci- 
fixion to regenerate and sanctify, because it has 
a basis of appeal in our best natural human 
affections. By the revelation of God's self- 
loyalty and vicariousness an appeal is made to 
the best instinct of the human heart — its own 
native capacity for self-sacrifice — an appeal that 
is the most powerful and quickening of all 
152 



THE POWER OF THE CROSS 

spiritual appeals. "I, if I be lifted up, will 
draw all men unto Me." The cross within the 
soul answers to the cross without; the spiritual 
principle involved into the cosmos answers to 
the historic fact of the crucifixion; the Spirit 
of God in man to the Spirit of God in Christ. 
When the soul disturbed by conviction for 
sin gets a vision of the cross of Christ, and 
realizes that it is the objectification of the better 
self, as well as of the heart of Deity, there is 
a sudden leap of the Spirit within toward the 
Word without — a sudden recognition, a " beget- 
ting by the Word of God," followed by a sense 
of inward peace and reconciliation — a witness- 
ing of the Spirit with our spirit that we are 
the children of God, whereby we cry, "Abba, 
Father." 

"The Spirit answers to the blood, 
And tells me I am born of God. ' ' 

Condemnation seems suddenly to be lifted, and 
a sense of pardon possesses the soul. God 's love 
then becomes ' ' manifested in us, ' ' as John says, 
and the atonement of grace becomes effectual. 
153 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

"The word of the cross is to them that per- 
ish foolishness; but unto us who are saved it 
is the power of God." (1 Cor. 1:18.) The 
cross of Christ is revelation ; it is also the means 
by which God through the Holy Spirit changes 
the heart of man, and reconciles the world unto 
Himself. It is light and power. "Christ the 
Power of God and the Wisdom of God." 



154 



CHAPTER XI 

The Principle of the Lord's Supper 

"He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My 
blood hath eternal life," 

"It is the Spirit that giveth life; the flesh 
profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken 
unto you are spirit and are life." 
John 6:54, 63. 



Chapter XI 
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 

IT seems clear that atonement in its fullest 
sense is symbolized by the Lord's Supper; 
and the view of the atonement outlined in 
this treatise receives strong support from this 
sacrament. It is surely the sacrament of the 
cosmic law of vicariousness. The broken bread 
and the expressed juice of the grape are them- 
selves an exhibition of the fact that even in 
the sub-human world beings give up their lives 
for other lives. ' ' This is My body which is given 
for you." "This is My blood of the covenant, 
which is poured out for you." In these words, 
as in His reply to the Greeks, Jesus proclaims 
that His act of self -giving is akin to that of 
the grain of wheat crushed to make bread, and 
to the grape pouring out its life for others. The 
fact of communion at this point is what gives 
value to the bread and wine as elements of the 
sacrament. It is a cosmic truth here made 
157 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

sacramental. Jesus here proclaims that His sac- 
rifice on Calvary is the cap-stone of the uni- 
versal vicariousness that has its broad base in the 
constitution of nature — the climax of the total 
plan. He proclaims by inference that the sign 
of the cross is upon the wheat and upon the 
grape, and these elements, in their self-sacrifice 
for others, point to Him as the fulfillment of 
their law, and thus become an age-long memorial 
of His death and passion for us. 

This ceremony, however, is not merely the 
sacrament of vicariousness, but of vicariousness 
appropriated. Bread and wine are useless as a 
sacrament until taken into the body. So is there 
no value in the broken body and shed blood 
of Jesus until we eat Christ's flesh and drink 
His blood, even as He said in the sixth of John. 
The grace of God cleanses us from all sin only 
when we appropriate the principles of loyalty 
and of altruism to our own lives by taking up 
the cross. Without personal acceptance of a life 
of loyalty to truth and of self-devotion to the 
service of others, there is no forgiveness; for 
we are yet in our sins, and have neither part 
158 



THE PRINCIPLE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 

nor lot in this matter. "Without the shedding 
of blood there is no remission of sins;" and we 
must mingle our blood with the Savior 's. Christ 
appropriated is the means of salvation — the 
cause of eternal life; for "except ye eat the 
flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, 
ye have not life in yourselves." There is no 
pardon outside of an appropriated Christ ; if we 
have not the Spirit of Christ, we are none of 
His: there is no reconciliation apart from con- 
formity to the law of His life and death; there 
is no mysterious atonement wrought in heaven, 
for those who are not willing to wear the cross 
deep in their hearts, like the aged Sir Launfal; 
but there is grace enough behind the cross of 
Calvary to cover the past offenses of the whole 
world against truth and love, if only the world 
will in faith turn to Christ's cross and take it 
up as the supreme principle of human life. 

"The cup of blessing which we bless, is it 
not a communion of [participation in] the blood 
of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not 
a communion of the body of Christ?" (1 Cor. 
10:16.) These are significant words. To par- 
159 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

take of the ' ' Communion " without having the 
Spirit of Christ — which is the Spirit of the cross 
— to take the sacrament, while selfishness reigns 
in our lives, is to eat the bread and drink the 
cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, and to 
be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. It 
is like eating friendly bread with the spirit or 
heart of an enemy, as did Judas. "If we say 
that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in 
darkness, we lie, and do not the truth:" there 
is no atonement, no propitiation; "but if we 
walk in the light" — the light of the cross — "as 
He is the light, we have felloivship one with 
another (that is, we with God, as well as Chris- 
tians with one another), and the blood of Jesus 
His Son cleanseth us from all sin." This cer- 
tainly means that it is "fellowship" that makes 
atonement effectual; and there is no fellowship 
with God apart from fellowship in the blood of 
Jesus, seal and symbol of the divine principle of 
self -loyalty and loving service. Outside of this 
principle there is no communion between man 
and God. In the "fellowship of Christ's suf- 
ferings" we are cleansed and saved; and there 
160 



THE PRINCIPLE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 

is none other name given among men, except a 
crucified Christ, whereby we can be saved. Only 
as we bear one another's burdens, as God in 
Christ has borne ours, shall we fulfill "the law 
of Christ." 



161 



CHAPTER XII 

Modern Views and Ancient 
Language 

"By grace have ye been saved through 
faith."— Eph. 2:8. 

"Ministers of a new covenant; not of the 
letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, 
but the spirit giveth life." — 2 Cor. 3: 6. 



Chapter XII 

MODERN VIEWS AND ANCIENT 
LANGUAGE 

PLAUSIBLE objection to the theory of 
atonement outlined in these studies may- 
be made on the ground that it does not 
closely accord with the expiatory language of 
the Scriptures. Since this criticism weighs 
heavily in the minds of many, a few things 
should be said concerning the institution of sac- 
rifice. 

Sacrifice is a very ancient and widely prac- 
ticed custom. Nearly all the important ancient 
cults comprised this element of worship, and the 
prevalence of bloody sacrifice is significant. An 
institution of this kind, primitive and all but 
universal, must have grown out of a funda- 
mental instinct of the human soul. The psycho- 
logic fact back of the rite was, we believe, the 
sense of sin and the consequent feeling of the 
displeasure of Deity, together with the desire 
.165 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

for the favor and friendship of Deity. The 
author is aware of the arguments against this 
view of the sense of sin as the source of sacrifice, 
but to him they are not entirely convincing. 
Other notions than the sense of sin doubtless 
enter into the origin of sacrifice ; but we believe 
this is the most powerful cause of the phenome- 
non. In recent theories of the origin of sacri- 
fice we believe the conscience has not had its 
just dues. 

The giving up of property in the form of 
the product of field or fold and its offering as 
a religious meal was intended as an exhibition to 
Deity of the worshiper's desire for communion. 
This act of unselfishness in voluntarily giving up 
the best of the flock or the first-fruits of the field 
gave the worshiper a sense of the divine favor. 
God was thought of as angry and needing pro- 
pitiation, and moral unworthiness was thought of 
as needing expiation ; or else God was conceived 
as in good humor, and the sacrifice was for the 
purpose of keeping Him so. Propitiation of 
Deity and expiation of sin were, by a sound spir- 
itual instinct, supposed to be procured by an act 
166 



MODERN VIEWS 

of unselfishness on the part of the worshiper. 
The worshiper recognized his dent to Deity and 
that the debt demanded the gift of his own life, 
or of what was in some cases dearer than life. 
This is the explanation of the ancient practice of 
the sacrifice of children. This moral instinct 
is evident in Abraham's offering of Isaac, and 
in the Hebrew notion of the devotedness of the 
first-born and its redemption. The sacrifice of 
animals in lieu of the life of the worshiper or 
of the worshiper's child was a symbolic act by 
which human obligation of self -sacrifice to Deity 
was recognized. Deity was supposed to accept 
this sacrifice as an acknowledgment of the moral 
debt, and was propitiated. Tragically misguided 
though it was, the spiritual instinct felt clearly 
that unselfishness was the basis of reconciliation. 
The Mosaic system did not inaugurate, but 
rather incorporated and elaborated the institu- 
tion of the sacrifice. Prominent in Old Testa- 
ment thought is the expiatory and propitiatory 
idea. Even the superficial student can see that, 
whatever might have been the primitive, pre- 
Mosaic notion of sacrifice, the dominant idea in 
167 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

the elaborated system of Judaism is that of ex- 
piation for sin and propitiation of Deity. 

That these costly and bloody sacrifices really, 
in themselves, effected the forgiveness of sin and 
the propitiation of God was denied by the 
prophets and by New Testament interpreters of 
religion. "Obedience is better than sacrifice," 
declared Samuel. "Sacrifice and offering Thou 
hast no delight in : mine ears hast Thou opened ; 
burnt-offering and sin-offering hast Thou not 
required. ... I delight to do Thy will, 
God; yea, Thy law is within my heart." (Psa. 
40: 6-8.) "Thou delightest not in sacrifice; else 
would I give it : Thou hast no pleasure in burnt- 
offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken 
spirit: a broken and a contrite spirit, God, 
Thou wilt not despise." (Psa. 51:16, 17.) 
Isaiah declared that God had had enough of the 
burnt-offerings of rams, and that He delighted 
not in the blood of bullocks; that righteousness 
of life was the only acceptable offering. Jere- 
miah went so far as to say that Jehovah had not 
commanded these bloody oblations when Israel 
came out of Egypt. Hosea proclaimed that God 
168 



MODERN VIEWS 

desired goodness and not sacrifice; and the 
knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings. 
(Ch. 6:6.) Amos (5:21-24) and Micah (6: 
6-8) declared the same truth. The writer of 
Hebrews specifically denied that the blood of 
bulls and of goats should take away sins. 

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to assume 
that the institution of sacrifice was not without 
value. While the blood of animals alone effected 
no change in the attitude of Deity toward the 
worshiper, yet the pathetic offering of innocent 
animals for the sins of the people had important 
educative value to the primitive mind in deepen- 
ing the sense of sin and the idea of God's holi- 
ness. It emphasized man's moral un worthiness 
to approach a pure God without the principle of 
self-sacrifice symbolized in the blood of the vic- 
tim. It accentuated the idea of God's opinion 
of sin and the idea of vicariousness involved in 
the shedding of the blood of a substituted victim. 

It was to be expected that New Testament 
teachers would make use of these ideas of sac- 
rifice in expounding to the people educated in 
this bloody cult the meaning of Christ's death. 
169 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

The idea of substituted propitiatory sacrifice was 
the point of contact with that age. The Book 
of Hebrews is an elaborate attempt to relate 
the older covenant with the new, and to show 
the analogy between the priesthood and death 
of Christ and the priesthood and sacrifices of 
the older cult. But analogy is not identity. 
There may be striking analogy between the death 
of the sacrificial victim and the sacrificial death 
of the Savior ; but that does not necessarily imply 
the same ethical and religious significance. 
Points of analogy between the ancient institu- 
tion of sacrifice and the death of Christ, New 
Testament teachers are fond of pointing out. 
For instance, as the blood of lambs was formerly 
supposed to take away sin, now, they say, "Be- 
hold in Christ the Lamb of God that taketh away 
the sin of the world." As there was redemption 
of the first-born by the sacrifice of money, so 
now, they declare, under the new covenant there 
is redemption in the blood of Christ. As by 
the shedding of blood in sacrifice there was sup- 
posed to be remission of sins, so in the blood of 
Christ there is forgiveness. As there was 
170 



MODERN VIEWS 

thought to be propitiation of God in sacrificial 
offering, so Christ is now the propitiation for our 
sins. As the blood of the Passover saved the 
life of those who sprinkled it upon their doors, 
so Christ is our Passover. All this is the lan- 
guage, not of identity, but of analogy. It is 
not necessary to infer identity of function be- 
tween the blood of bulls and of goats and the 
blood of Christ. Because the former was con- 
ceived to be actual propitiation for sin we need 
not infer that the latter was actual propitiation 
of an offended God who required satisfaction be- 
fore He would remit sin, or that Christ was 
a literal oblation substituted for the sinner. 

The sacrificial language of the New Testa- 
ment requires for its true interpretation, in order 
to be consistent with the general thought of 
God's attitude toward men, a principle different 
from that of identity. The ethics and the spirit 
of the Christian religion would seem to demand 
an interpretation of this sacrificial language 
somewhat as follows: Back of the salvation of 
man, including remission of sin, regeneration, 
and sanctification, and the preservation of the 
171 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

soul to eternal life, is the grace of God. Of 
this ineffable grace the blood of the God-man is 
the sign and seal — the seal of a new covenant, 
not of the continuation of the old one. You (the 
Jews) have ransomed your first-born with money 
or with substituted sacrifice: now, under the 
covenant of grace, the grace of God manifested 
in the blood of Jesus is your ransom, your re- 
demption. You have been offering blood, think- 
ing to propitiate Jehovah for your sins: now 
God's grace, through faith in Christ's blood as 
the sure testimony of that grace, is to be ac- 
cepted as the sufficient propitiation and atone- 
ment for your sins. God is not an ill-natured 
and bloodthirsty Being: He is your righteous 
and gracious Father, whose "grace is sufficient 
for you." Cease these bloody expiations and 
propitiations : for the grace of the Father is the 
sufficient propitiation for the sins of the whole 
world. Believe in the blood of Christ as the 
sacramental symbol of that grace, and let it take 
the place in your thought formerly occupied by 
bloody sin-offerings. This self-respecting, self- 
sacrificing love of God, at high tide in the death 
172 



MODERN VIEWS 

of Christ, is the sufficient fountain of forgive- 
ness, redemption, ransom, propitiation, atone- 
ment, the substitute for all the cruel and bloody 
sacrifices of the former days, the complete satis- 
faction of all your spiritual instincts. This is 
the "good news" of the Kingdom'. 

This principle of analogy, we believe, meets 
the exigencies of Scripture language without do- 
ing violence to the New Testament thought of 
God, and has the further merit of keeping the 
atonement within the sphere of our experience 
and of relieving the subject from, mysticism. 



173 



CHAPTER XIII 

Recapitulation 



"To sum up all things in Christ, the things 
in the heavens, and the things upon the earth." 



Eph. 1:10. 



Chapter XIII 
RECAPITULATION 

IT may be helpful to a clearer understanding 
of the foregoing exposition to bring the 
main points together in a brief resume. 
1. The material and spiritual creation is 
God's expression of Himself. Both natural and 
moral laws are the divine will impressed upon 
the cosmos. Christ the Son is the eternal ob- 
jective expression of Deity, "the image of the 
invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for 
in Him were all things created, in the heavens 
and upon the earth, things visible and invisible ; 
. . . all things have been created through 
Him and unto Him ; and He is before all things, 
and in Him all things consist. ' ' (Col. 1 : 15, 16.) 
The Eternal Son is the Word, (that is, the Ex- 
pression of Deity), that was in the beginning 
with God, and was God, "the effulgence of His 
glory, the very image [or impress] of His sub- 
12 177 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

stance." The historic Christ is that Word be- 
come flesh, and dwelling among us as the "hu- 
man life of God." 

2. The cross, in its largest meaning, is the 
cosmic expression of divine integrity and of 
divine love. It is the exhibition, both in nature 
and in history, of the divine struggle for self- 
realization. In other words, it is the struggle 
to "reconcile all things unto Himself . . . 
through the blood of His cross ; whether of things 
upon earth, or things in the heavens." A hu- 
man analogy is a sculptor struggling to realize 
his conception in a statue, or a moral reformer 
struggling to realize his moral ideal in social 
conditions. In each case there is an effort to 
reconcile the objective with the subjective. 

3. This cosmic struggle is manifested in na- 
ture (1) in the law of struggle for self-preserva- 
tion and the survival of the fitttest, with man as 
the consummation; (2) in the law of struggle 
for the life of others. In the moral sphere it is 
manifested (1) in the phenomenon of self -pro- 
pitiation, by which is meant the voluntary sacri- 
fice of some temporal good — even physical life 

178 



RECAPITULATION 

itself — for the maintenance of moral integrity. 
In the moral world the primitive struggle for 
life takes the form of the struggle for holiness — 
the realization of the spiritual self. 

The death on the cross was God's oblation of 
Himself to Himself, the satisfaction in suffering 
given by Incarnate Deity to the demands of His 
own holy character or law — the "propitiation" 
made by the world 's Savior in pain and shedding 
of blood to His own self-respect. It was the 
price of self-preservation and of self-realization. 

(2) The ancient struggle for the life of 
others culminates in the moral realm in Chris- 
tian service. God's love for us sent the only 
begotten Son to suffer that we might not eter- 
nally suffer, to redeem us from ignorance, weak- 
ness, and sin. He did not suffer to defeat the 
claims of justice on us, nor to cheat the law 
out of its mortgage on sinners. He was not pun- 
ished in our stead. He died not to release us 
from social and organic consequences of sin, but 
from sin itself. His death is no magical or 
mystical substitute for righteous living on our 
part. But His blessed life of purity and re- 
179 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

nunciation for our enlightenment and help is 
"the power of God unto salvation" from sinful 
living, the healing fountain of living waters. 
Jesus is the climax of the cosmic principle of 
giving oneself for others — the completion of the 
cosmic law of love. 

4. The historic death of Jesus, therefore, is 
the focus of the cosmic struggle where both these 
laws meet; where the divine character realizes 
itself in perfect expression; where divine in- 
tegrity and divine love are together fulfilled in 
one act of supreme sacrifice. In this act things 
in heaven — elements in the very Godhead itself — 
are reconciled, realized, perfected. "Though He 
was a Son, yet [He] learned obedience by the 
things which He suffered ; and having been made 
perfect, He became unto all them that obey Him 
the Author of eternal salvation." (Heb. 5: 
8, 9.) "For it became Him, for whom are all 
things, and through whom are all things, in 
bringing many sons unto glory, to make the 
Author of their salvation perfect through suffer- 
ings." (Heb. 2:10.) These quotations indi- 
cate that the Godhead itself was in some sense 
180 



RECAPITULATION 

not perfect until "it is finished"* at the death 
of Christ. In the incarnation, death, and resur- 
rection of the Man Christ Jesus, God Himself 
was "perfected" in the sense that He had com- 
pletely realized Himself at one point in hu- 
manity. The blood of Christ, "who through the 
Eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish 
unto God, ' ' did effect something in the Godhead, 
as well as in humanity. The death of Jesus 
made no elemental change in the Father's char- 
acter, nor in His attitude toward men; but it 
did bring to perfection, in objective realization, 
the eternal character of God. The lady's act of 
severing her hand to send to Saladin for the 
redemption of her lover made no elemental 
change in her loyalty and love, but it did bring 
that loyalty and love to perfect objective realiza- 
tion. In the death of Jesus the divine char- 
acter returns unto itself in a completed circle, 
reconciling the Godhead within itself. ' ' Of Him, 
through Him, and unto Him are all things." 
5. The historic death of Jesus also effected 



* John 19: 30. The word teleo, to complete, make per- 
fect, bring to maturity, is used in all these passages. 

181 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

reconciliation "upon earth," in making complete 
self -revelation of God. Its glory "condemned 
sin in the flesh," as beauty condemns all ugli- 
ness, as truth condemns falsehood. The cross 
is pregnant with power to kill sin and death — 
to transform human character — to reconcile the 
world with the character of God, and so make 
peace. The cross of Christ is the result of the 
clash between God's character and man's sin. 
Sin is the dark background upon which is written 
in letters of living light the glory of God. Sin 
was the occasion and cause of the Savior's in- 
effable sufferings. Never was there such com- 
plete condemnation of sin as the crucifixion of 
the sinless Savior. At the cross holiness and 
love met sin in terrible conflict, and conquered. 
"Jesus conquered when He fell." Sin is an act 
or state which is the opposite of soul-loyalty and 
of love. It is, therefore, the denial of God. It 
can be cured only by its opposite — the principle 
of the cross, which is the affirmation of God. 

6. We are forgiven of past offenses through 
the grace of God, revealed and symbolized by 
the blood of Jesus, which is the "propitiation for 
182 



RECAPITULATION 

our sins" in the sense that it is the pledge of 
God's propitiousness toward the repentant sin- 
ner. Doubtless many theologians have insisted 
too strenuously upon the literalness of the sacri- 
ficial terms of the New Testament. The New 
Testament was addressed to people whose minds 
were thoroughly possessed by ideas of bloody sac- 
rifices given to propitiate Deity or to redeem the 
soul. New Testament writers, taking this fact 
as an avenue of approach to the ancient mind, 
used the language of the altar in trying to make 
clear what Christ had done in heaven and in 
earth. "You have been offering the blood of 
bulls and of goats as propitiation for your sins, 
as redemption for your souls; you have been 
sprinkling on your lintels and door-posts the 
blood of lambs as your passover. But now the 
crucified Christ is the propitiation for your sins, 
your redemption, your passover. He is the sub- 
stitute for all these sacrifices. " Is it necessary to 
insist on the absolutely literal character of these 
sacrificial terms in order to represent the real 
work of Christ? What they seem to the author 
to mean is, that the blood of Christ is a substitute 
183 



STUDIES IN THE ATONEMENT 

for all that old ceremonialism. God's grace 
speaking through the blood is a substitute for 
all the bloody hecatombs of the religion of fear. 
We are freely forgiven by the grace of God, 
which is a substitute for a righteousness which, 
up to the moment of our regeneration, we do 
not have. 

We are forgiven of past sin the moment we 
believe in Jesus enough to renounce sin, and 
choose as our dominant motive the principle of 
the cross — namely, the principle of personal rec- 
titude and of self-denying service, which is the 
essence of that pure religion which consists in 
visiting the fatherless and widows in their af- 
fliction and in keeping oneself unspotted from 
the world. 

And now we wish to give final emphasis to 
our thesis that "The Cross" is a cosmic fact not 
comprehended in its entirety by the physical 
death and spiritual suffering of Jesus on Cal- 
vary, but embraces the universal principle of the 
Loyal Self and of Vicariousness manifest in all 
creation, not alone at the culminating point 
184 



RECAPITULATION 

of its historic manifestation; although at that 
culminating point the two seemingly opposite 
laws of self-preservation and of self-sacrifice 
come into final and perfect harmony. Jesus is 
the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. 
Men, both before and after the historic death 
of the Son, are justified by the grace of God 
that speaks through the blood of Jesus, made 
effectual by their personal acceptance of the 
principle of the Eternal Cross; and that prin- 
ciple is embodied in these words of the Great 
Cross-bearer : 

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
mind; and, . . . Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself," — 

a saying which embodies, first, loyalty to truth, 
and second, self-denying public spirit; and in 
these : 

"If any man would come after Me, let him 
deny himself, and take up his cross and follow 
Me. For whosoever would save his life shall 
lose it: and whosoever shall lose his life for My 
sake shall find it." -jgg 



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